Blurbs:

He sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the
furniture! Science fiction needs Cory Doctorow!

Bruce Sterling

Author, The Hacker Crackdown and Distraction

In the true spirit of Walt Disney, Doctorow has ripped a part of
our common culture, mixed it with a brilliant story, and burned into
our culture a new set of memes that will be with us for a generation
at least.

Lawrence Lessig

Author, The Future of Ideas

Cory Doctorow doesn't just write about the future – I think he lives there. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom isn't
just a really good read, it's also, like the best kind
of fiction, a kind of guide book. See the Tomorrowland of Tomorrow
today, and while you're there, why not drop by
Frontierland, and the Haunted Mansion as well? (It's the
Mansion that's the haunted heart of this book.) Cory
makes me feel nostalgic for the future – a dizzying, yet rather pleasant sensation, as if I'm
spiraling down the tracks of Space Mountain over and over again.
Visit the Magic Kingdom and live forever!

Kelly Link

Author, Stranger Things Happen

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is the most entertaining and
exciting science fiction story I've read in the last few
years. I love page-turners, especially when they are as unusual as
this novel. I predict big things for Down and Out—it
could easily become a breakout genre-buster.

Mark Frauenfelder

Contributing Editor, Wired Magazine

Imagine you woke up one day and Walt Disney had taken over the
world. Not only that, but money's been abolished and
somebody's developed the Cure for Death. Welcome to the
Bitchun Society—and make sure you're
strapped in tight, because it's going to be a wild ride.
In a world where everyone's wishes can come true, one
man returns to the original, crumbling city of dreams—Disney
World. Here in the spiritual center of the Bitchun Society he
struggles to find and preserve the original, human face of the Magic
Kingdom against the young, post-human and increasingly alien
inheritors of the Earth. Now that any experience can be simulated,
human relationships become ever more fragile; and to Julius, the
corny, mechanical ghosts of the Haunted Mansion have come to seem
like a precious link to a past when we could tell the real from the
simulated, the true from the false.

Cory Doctorow—cultural critic, Disneyphile, and
ultimate Early Adopter—uses language with the reckless
confidence of the Beat poets. Yet behind the dazzling prose and
vibrant characters lie ideas we should all pay heed to. The future
rushes on like a plummeting roller coaster, and it's
hard to see where we're going. But at least with this
book Doctorow has given us a map of the park.

Karl Schroeder

Author, Permanence

Cory Doctorow is the most interesting new SF writer I've
come across in years. He starts out at the point where older SF
writers' speculations end. It's a distinct
pleasure to give him some Whuffie.

Rudy Rucker

Author, Spaceland

Cory Doctorow rocks! I check his blog about ten times a day,
because he's always one of the first to notice a major
incursion from the social-technological-pop-cultural future, and his
voice is a compelling vehicle for news from the future. Down and Out
in The Magic Kingdom is about a world that is visible in its
outlines today, if you know where to look, from reputation systems
to peer-to-peer adhocracies. Doctorow knows where to look, and how
to word-paint the rest of us into the picture.

Howard Rheingold

Author, Smart Mobs

Doctorow is more than just a sick mind looking to twist the
perceptions of those whose realities remain uncorrupted - though
that should be enough recommendation to read his work. Down and
Out in the Magic Kingdom is black comedic, sci-fi prophecy on
the dangers of surrendering our consensual hallucination to the
regime. Fun to read, but difficult to sleep afterwards.

Douglas Rushkoff

Author of Cyberia and Media Virus!

“Wow! Disney imagineering meets nanotechnology, the
reputation economy, and Ray Kurzweil's transhuman
future. As much fun as Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and
as packed with mind bending ideas about social changes cascading
from the frontiers of science.”

Tim O'Reilly

Publisher and Founder, O'Reilly and Associates

Doctorow has created a rich and exciting vision of the future,
and then wrote a page-turner of a story in it. I couldn't
put the book down.

Bruce Schneier

Author, Secrets and Lies

Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring,
savvy, entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to
the wired world of the twenty-first century that stretches out
before us as you're going to find.

Gardner Dozois

Editor, Asimov's SF

Cory Doctorow's “Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom” tells a gripping,
fast-paced story that hinges on thought-provoking extrapolation from
today's technical realities. This is the sort of book
that captures and defines the spirit of a turning point in human
history when our tools remake ourselves and our world.

Mitch Kapor

Founder, Lotus, Inc., co-founder Electronic Frontier Foundation

A note about this book, February 12, 2004:

As you will see, when you read the text beneath this section, I
released this book a little over a year ago under the terms of a
Creative Commons license that allowed my readers to freely
redistribute the text without needing any further permission from
me. In this fashion, I enlisted my readers in the service of a grand
experiment, to see how my book could find its way into cultural
relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked out very
satisfactorily.

When I originally licensed the book under the terms set out in
the next section, I did so in the most conservative fashion
possible, using CC's most restrictive license. I wanted to dip my
toe in before taking a plunge. I wanted to see if the sky would
fall: you see writers are routinely schooled by their peers that
maximal copyright is the only thing that stands between us and
penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though I
had the intellectual intuition that a "some rights reserved"
regime would serve me well, I still couldn't shake the atavistic
fear that I was about to do something very foolish indeed.

It wasn't foolish. I've since released a short story collection
(A Place So Foreign and Eight
More and a second novel (Eastern
Standard Tribe) in this fashion, and my career is turning over
like a goddamned locomotive engine. I am thrilled beyond words (an
extraordinary circumstance for a writer!) at the way that this has
all worked out.

And so now I'm going to take a little bit of a plunge.
Today, in coincidence with my talk at the O'Reilly Emerging
Technology Conference (Ebooks:
Neither E, Nor Books).

I am re-licensing this book under a far less restrictive Creative
Commons license, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
This is a license that allows you, the reader, to noncommercially
"remix" this book -- you have my blessing to make your own
translations, radio and film adaptations, sequels, fan fiction,
missing chapters, machine remixes, you name it. A number of you
assumed that you had my blessing to do this in the first place, and
I can't say that I've been at all put out by the delightful and
creative derivative works created from this book, but now you have
my explicit blessing, and I hope you'll use it.

Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this
work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license
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* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to
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* Any of these conditions can be waived if you get
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Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by
the above.

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A note about this book, January 9, 2003:

“Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” is my first novel. It's an actual, no-foolin'
words-on-paper book, published by the good people at Tor Books in
New York City. You can buy this book in stores or online, by
following links like this one:

I'm releasing the entire text of this book as a free,
freely redistributable e-book. You can download it, put it on a P2P
net, put it on your site, email it to a friend, and, if you're
addicted to dead trees, you can even print it.

Why am I doing this thing? Well, it's a long story,
but to shorten it up: first-time novelists have a tough row to hoe.
Our publishers don't have a lot of promotional budget to
throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on
word-of-mouth. I'm not bad at word-of-mouth. I have a
blog, Boing Boing (http://boingboing.net), where I do a lot
of word-of-mouthing. I compulsively tell friends and strangers about
things that I like.

And telling people about stuff I like is way, way
easier if I can just send it to 'em. Way easier.

What's more, P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of
the books, music and movies ever released are not available for
sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have
flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put
just about everything online. What's more,
they've done it for cheaper than any other
archiving/revival effort ever. I'm a stone infovore and
this kinda Internet mishegas gives me a serious frisson of
futurosity.

Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it's hard to
figure out how people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is
a lot of social upheaval and a serious threat to innovation,
freedom, business, and whatnot. It's your basic
end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction
writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my
stock-in-trade.

All that said, here's the deal: I'm
releasing this book under a license developed by the Creative
Commons project (http://creativecommons.org/).
This is a project that lets people like me roll our own license
agreements for the distribution of our creative work under terms
similar to those employed by the Free/Open Source Software movement.
It's a great project, and I'm proud to be a
part of it.

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This License constitutes the entire agreement between the
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You. This License may not be modified without the mutual written
agreement of the Licensor and You.

PROLOGUE

I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of
the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three
symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in
Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.

I never thought I'd live to see the day when Keep
A-Movin' Dan would decide to deadhead until the heat
death of the Universe.

Dan was in his second or third blush of youth when I first met
him, sometime late-XXI. He was a rangy cowpoke, apparent 25 or so,
all rawhide squint-lines and sunburned neck, boots worn thin and
infinitely comfortable. I was in the middle of my Chem thesis, my
fourth Doctorate, and he was taking a break from Saving the World,
chilling on campus in Toronto and core-dumping for some poor Anthro
major. We hooked up at the Grad Students' Union—the
GSU, or Gazoo for those who knew—on a busy Friday night,
summer-ish. I was fighting a coral-slow battle for a stool at the
scratched bar, inching my way closer every time the press of bodies
shifted, and he had one of the few seats, surrounded by a litter of
cigarette junk and empties, clearly encamped.

Some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised
a sun-bleached eyebrow. “You get any closer, son, and
we're going to have to get a pre-nup.”

I was apparent forty or so, and I thought about bridling at being
called son, but I looked into his eyes and decided that he had
enough realtime that he could call me son anytime he wanted. I
backed off a little and apologized.

He struck a cig and blew a pungent, strong plume over the
bartender's head. “Don't worry
about it. I'm probably a little over accustomed to
personal space.”

I couldn't remember the last time I'd
heard anyone on-world talk about personal space. With the mortality
rate at zero and the birth-rate at non-zero, the world was
inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people, even with the
migratory and deadhead drains on the population. “You've
been jaunting?” I asked—his
eyes were too sharp for him to have missed an instant's
experience to deadheading.

He chuckled. “No sir, not me. I'm into the
kind of macho shitheadery that you only come across on-world.
Jaunting's for play; I need work.” The bar-glass tinkled a counterpoint.

I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I
had to resize the window—he had too many zeroes to fit
on my standard display. I tried to act cool, but he caught the
upwards flick of my eyes and then their involuntary widening. He
tried a little aw-shucksery, gave it up and let a prideful grin
show.

“I try not to pay it much mind. Some people, they get
overly grateful.” He must've
seen my eyes flick up again, to pull his Whuffie history. “Wait,
don't go doing that—I'll tell
you about it, you really got to know.

“Damn, you know, it's so easy to get used
to life without hyperlinks. You'd think you'd
really miss 'em, but you don't.”

And it clicked for me. He was a missionary—one of
those fringe-dwellers who act as emissary from the Bitchun Society
to the benighted corners of the world where, for whatever reasons,
they want to die, starve, and choke on petrochem waste. It's
amazing that these communities survive more than a generation; in
the Bitchun Society proper, we usually outlive our detractors. The
missionaries don't have such a high success rate—you
have to be awfully convincing to get through to a culture that's
already successfully resisted nearly a century's worth
of propaganda—but when you convert a whole village, you
accrue all the Whuffie they have to give. More often, missionaries
end up getting refreshed from a backup after they aren't
heard from for a decade or so. I'd never met one in the
flesh before.

“How many successful missions have you had?” I asked.

“Figured it out, huh? I've just come off
my fifth in twenty years—counterrevolutionaries hidden
out in the old Cheyenne Mountain NORAD site, still there a
generation later.” He sandpapered
his whiskers with his fingertips. “Their parents went to
ground after their life's savings vanished, and they had
no use for tech any more advanced than a rifle. Plenty of those,
though.”

He spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the
acceptance of the mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then
betrayed it in subtle, beneficent ways: introducing Free Energy to
their greenhouses, then a gengineered crop or two, then curing a
couple deaths, slowly inching them toward the Bitchun Society, until
they couldn't remember why they hadn't
wanted to be a part of it from the start. Now they were mostly
off-world, exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy and
unlimited supplies and deadheading through the dull times en route.

“I guess it'd be too much of a shock for
them to stay on-world. They think of us as the enemy, you
know—they had all kinds of plans drawn up for when we
invaded them and took them away; hollow suicide teeth, booby-traps,
fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors. They just can't
get over hating us, even though we don't even know they
exist. Off-world, they can pretend that they're still
living rough and hard.” He rubbed
his chin again, his hard calluses grating over his whiskers. “But
for me, the real rough life is right here, on-world. The little
enclaves, each one is like an alternate history of humanity—what
if we'd taken the Free Energy, but not deadheading? What
if we'd taken deadheading, but only for the critically
ill, not for people who didn't want to be bored on long
bus-rides? Or no hyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, no Whuffie? Each one is
different and wonderful.”

I have a stupid habit of arguing for the sake of, and I found
myself saying, “Wonderful? Oh sure, nothing finer than,
oh, let's see, dying, starving, freezing, broiling,
killing, cruelty and ignorance and pain and misery. I know I sure
miss it.”

Keep A-Movin' Dan snorted. “You think a
junkie misses sobriety?”

I knocked on the bar. “Hello! There aren't
any junkies anymore!”

He struck another cig. “But you know what a junkie is,
right? Junkies don't miss sobriety, because they don't
remember how sharp everything was, how the pain made the joy
sweeter. We can't remember what it was like to work to
earn our keep; to worry that there might not be enough,
that we might get sick or get hit by a bus. We don't
remember what it was like to take chances, and we sure as shit
don't remember what it felt like to have them pay
off.”

He had a point. Here I was, only in my second or third adulthood,
and already ready to toss it all in and do something, anything,
else. He had a point—but I wasn't about to
admit it. “So you say. I say, I take a chance when I
strike up a conversation in a bar, when I fall in love… and what about the deadheads? Two people I know, they just went
deadhead for ten thousand years! Tell me that's not
taking a chance!” Truth be told,
almost everyone I'd known in my eighty-some years were
deadheading or jaunting or just gone. Lonely days, then.

“Brother, that's committing half-assed
suicide. The way we're going, they'll be
lucky if someone doesn't just switch 'em off
when it comes time to reanimate. In case you haven't
noticed, it's getting a little crowded around here.”

I made pish-tosh sounds and wiped off my forehead with a
bar-napkin—the Gazoo was beastly hot on summer nights.
“Uh-huh, just like the world was getting a little crowded
a hundred years ago, before Free Energy. Like it was getting too
greenhousey, too nukey, too hot or too cold. We fixed it then,
we'll fix it again when the time comes. I'm
gonna be here in ten thousand years, you damn betcha, but I think
I'll do it the long way around.”

He cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. If it had
been any of the other grad students, I'd have assumed he
was grepping for some bolstering factoids to support his next sally.
But with him, I just knew he was thinking about it, the
old-fashioned way.

“I think that if I'm still here in ten
thousand years, I'm going to be crazy as hell. Ten
thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art
was a goat. You really think you're going to be anything
recognizably human in a hundred centuries? Me, I'm not
interested in being a post-person. I'm going to wake up
one day, and I'm going to say, ‘Well, I guess
I've seen about enough,’ and that'll
be my last day.”

I had seen where he was going with this, and I had stopped paying
attention while I readied my response. I probably should have paid
more attention. “But why? Why not just deadhead for a few
centuries, see if there's anything that takes your
fancy, and if not, back to sleep for a few more? Why do anything so
final?”

He embarrassed me by making a show of thinking it over again,
making me feel like I was just a half-pissed glib poltroon. “I
suppose it's because nothing else is. I've
always known that someday, I was going to stop moving, stop seeking,
stop kicking, and have done with it. There'll come a day
when I don't have anything left to do, except stop.”

On campus, they called him Keep-A-Movin' Dan, because
of his cowboy vibe and because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew
to take over every conversation I had for the next six months. I
pinged his Whuffie a few times, and noticed that it was climbing
steadily upward as he accumulated more esteem from the people he met.

I'd pretty much pissed away most of my Whuffie—all
the savings from the symphonies and the first three theses—drinking
myself stupid at the Gazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering
profs, until I'd expended all the respect anyone had ever
afforded me. All except Dan, who, for some reason, stood me to
regular beers and meals and movies.

I got to feeling like I was someone special—not
everyone had a chum as exotic as Keep-A-Movin' Dan, the
legendary missionary who visited the only places left that were
closed to the Bitchun Society. I can't say for sure why
he hung around with me. He mentioned once or twice that he'd
liked my symphonies, and he'd read my Ergonomics thesis
on applying theme-park crowd-control techniques in urban settings,
and liked what I had to say there. But I think it came down to us
having a good time needling each other.

I'd talk to him about the vast carpet of the future
unrolling before us, of the certainty that we would encounter alien
intelligences some day, of the unimaginable frontiers open to each of
us. He'd tell me that deadheading was a strong indicator
that one's personal reservoir of introspection and
creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no real
victory.

This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times without
resolving. I'd get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured
the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but
respected, you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were
rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring
the thing that money really represented—your personal
capital with your friends and neighbors—you more
accurately gauged your success.

And then he'd lead me down a subtle, carefully baited
trail that led to my allowing that while, yes, we might someday
encounter alien species with wild and fabulous ways, that right now,
there was a slightly depressing homogeneity to the world.

On a fine spring day, I defended my thesis to two embodied humans
and one prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousness
was present via speakerphone from the computer where it was resting.
They all liked it. I collected my sheepskin and went out hunting for
Dan in the sweet, flower-stinking streets.

He'd gone. The Anthro major he'd been
torturing with his war-stories said that they'd wrapped
up that morning, and he'd headed to the walled city of
Tijuana, to take his shot with the descendants of a platoon of US
Marines who'd settled there and cut themselves off from
the Bitchun Society.

So I went to Disney World.

In deference to Dan, I took the flight in realtime, in the
minuscule cabin reserved for those of us who stubbornly refused to be
frozen and stacked like cordwood for the two hour flight. I was the
only one taking the trip in realtime, but a flight attendant
dutifully served me a urine-sample-sized orange juice and a rubbery,
pungent, cheese omelet. I stared out the windows at the infinite
clouds while the autopilot banked around the turbulence, and wondered
when I'd see Dan next.

CHAPTER 1

My girlfriend was 15 percent of my age, and I was old-fashioned
enough that it bugged me. Her name was Lil, and she was
second-generation Disney World, her parents being among the original
ad-hocracy that took over the management of Liberty Square and Tom
Sawyer Island. She was, quite literally, raised in Walt Disney World
and it showed.

It showed. She was neat and efficient in her every little thing,
from her shining red hair to her careful accounting of each gear and
cog in the animatronics that were in her charge. Her folks were in
canopic jars in Kissimmee, deadheading for a few centuries.

On a muggy Wednesday, we dangled our feet over the edge of the
Liberty Belle's riverboat pier, watching the listless
Confederate flag over Fort Langhorn on Tom Sawyer Island by
moonlight. The Magic Kingdom was all closed up and every last guest
had been chased out the gate underneath the Main Street train
station, and we were able to breathe a heavy sigh of relief, shuck
parts of our costumes, and relax together while the cicadas sang.

I was more than a century old, but there was still a kind of
magic in having my arm around the warm, fine shoulders of a girl by
moonlight, hidden from the hustle of the cleaning teams by the
turnstiles, breathing the warm, moist air. Lil plumped her head
against my shoulder and gave me a butterfly kiss under my jaw.

“Her name was McGill,” I
sang, gently.

“But she called herself Lil,” she sang, warm breath on my collarbones.

“And everyone knew her as Nancy,” I sang.

I'd been startled to know that she knew the Beatles.
They'd been old news in my youth, after all. But her
parents had given her a thorough—if
eclectic—education.

“Want to do a walk-through?” she asked. It was one of her favorite duties, exploring every
inch of the rides in her care with the lights on, after the horde of
tourists had gone. We both liked to see the underpinnings of the
magic. Maybe that was why I kept picking at the relationship.

“I'm a little pooped. Let's
sit a while longer, if you don't mind.”

She heaved a dramatic sigh. “Oh, all right. Old
man.” She reached up and gently
tweaked my nipple, and I gave a satisfying little jump. I think the
age difference bothered her, too, though she teased me for letting
it get to me.

“I think I'll be able to manage a totter
through the Haunted Mansion, if you just give me a moment to rest my
bursitis.” I felt her smile against
my shirt. She loved the Mansion; loved to turn on the ballroom
ghosts and dance their waltz with them on the dusty floor, loved to
try and stare down the marble busts in the library that followed
your gaze as you passed.

I liked it too, but I really liked just sitting there with her,
watching the water and the trees. I was just getting ready to go
when I heard a soft ping inside my cochlea. “Damn,” I said. “I've got a call.”

“Tell them you're busy,” she said.

“I will,” I said, and
answered the call subvocally. “Julius here.”

“Hi, Julius. It's Dan. You got a
minute?”

I knew a thousand Dans, but I recognized the voice immediately,
though it'd been ten years since we last got drunk at
the Gazoo together. I muted the subvocal and said, “Lil,
I've got to take this. Do you mind?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” she sarcased at me. She sat up and pulled out her crack pipe
and lit up.

“Dan,” I
subvocalized, “long time no speak.”

“Yeah, buddy, it sure has been,” he said, and his voice cracked on a sob.

I turned and gave Lil such a look, she dropped her pipe. “How
can I help?” she said, softly but
swiftly. I waved her off and switched the phone to full-vocal mode.
My voice sounded unnaturally loud in the cricket-punctuated calm.

“Where you at, Dan?” I
asked.

“Down here, in Orlando. I'm stuck out on
Pleasure Island.”

“All right,” I said.
“Meet me at, uh, the Adventurer's Club,
upstairs on the couch by the door. I'll be there
in—” I shot a look at
Lil, who knew the castmember-only roads better than I. She flashed
ten fingers at me. “Ten minutes.”

“Okay,” he said.
“Sorry.” He had his
voice back under control. I switched off.

“What's up?” Lil
asked.

“I'm not sure. An old friend is in town.
He sounds like he's got a problem.”

Lil pointed a finger at me and made a trigger-squeezing gesture.
“There,” she said.
“I've just dumped the best route to Pleasure
Island to your public directory. Keep me in the loop, okay?”

I set off for the utilidor entrance near the Hall of Presidents
and booted down the stairs to the hum of the underground
tunnel-system. I took the slidewalk to cast parking and zipped my
little cart out to Pleasure Island.

I found Dan sitting on the L-shaped couch underneath rows of
faked-up trophy shots with humorous captions. Downstairs,
castmembers were working the animatronic masks and idols, chattering
with the guests.

Dan was apparent fifty plus, a little paunchy and stubbled. He
had raccoon-mask bags under his eyes and he slumped listlessly. As I
approached, I pinged his Whuffie and was startled to see that it had
dropped to nearly zero.

“Jesus,” I said, as I
sat down next to him. “You look like hell, Dan.”

He nodded. “Appearances can be deceptive,” he said. “But in this case, they're
bang-on.”

“You want to talk about it?” I asked.

“Somewhere else, huh? I hear they ring in the New Year
every night at midnight; I think that'd be a little too
much for me right now.”

I led him out to my cart and cruised back to the place I shared
with Lil, out in Kissimmee. He smoked eight cigarettes on the twenty
minute ride, hammering one after another into his mouth, filling my
runabout with stinging clouds. I kept glancing at him in the
rear-view. He had his eyes closed, and in repose he looked dead. I
could hardly believe that this was my vibrant action-hero pal of
yore.

Surreptitiously, I called Lil's phone. “I'm
bringing him home,” I subvocalized.
“He's in rough shape. Not sure what it's
all about.”

“I'll make up the couch,” she said. “And get some coffee together. Love
you.”

“Back atcha, kid,” I
said.

As we approached the tacky little swaybacked ranch-house, he
opened his eyes. “You're a pal, Jules.” I waved him off. “No, really. I tried to think of
who I could call, and you were the only one. I've missed
you, bud.”

“Lil said she'd put some coffee on,” I said. “You sound like you need it.”

Lil was waiting on the sofa, a folded blanket and an extra pillow
on the side table, a pot of coffee and some Disneyland Beijing mugs
beside them. She stood and extended her hand. “I'm
Lil,” she said.

“Dan,” he said.
“It's a pleasure.”

I knew she was pinging his Whuffie and I caught her look of
surprised disapproval. Us oldsters who predate Whuffie know that
it's important; but to the kids, it's the
world. Someone without any is automatically suspect. I
watched her recover quickly, smile, and surreptitiously wipe her
hand on her jeans. “Coffee?” she said.

“Oh, yeah,” Dan said,
and slumped on the sofa.

She poured him a cup and set it on a coaster on the coffee table.
“I'll let you boys catch up, then,” she said, and started for the bedroom.

“No,” Dan said.
“Wait. If you don't mind. I think it'd
help if I could talk to someone… younger,
too.”

She set her face in the look of chirpy helpfulness that all the
second-gen castmembers have at their instant disposal and settled
into an armchair. She pulled out her pipe and lit a rock. I went
through my crack period before she was born, just after they made it
decaf, and I always felt old when I saw her and her friends light
up. Dan surprised me by holding out a hand to her and taking the
pipe. He toked heavily, then passed it back.

Dan closed his eyes again, then ground his fists into them,
sipped his coffee. It was clear he was trying to figure out where to
start.

“I believed that I was braver than I really am, is
what it boils down to,” he said.

“Who doesn't?” I
said.

“I really thought I could do it. I knew that someday
I'd run out of things to do, things to see. I knew that
I'd finish some day. You remember, we used to argue
about it. I swore I'd be done, and that would be the end
of it. And now I am. There isn't a single place left
on-world that isn't part of the Bitchun Society. There
isn't a single thing left that I want any part of.”

“So deadhead for a few centuries,” I said. “Put the decision off.”

“No!” he shouted,
startling both of us. “I'm done.
It's over.”

“So do it,” Lil said.

“I can't,” he sobbed, and buried his face in his hands. He cried like a
baby, in great, snoring sobs that shook his whole body. Lil went
into the kitchen and got some tissue, and passed it to me. I sat
alongside him and awkwardly patted his back.

“Jesus,” he said,
into his palms. “Jesus.”

“Dan?” I said,
quietly.

He sat up and took the tissue, wiped off his face and hands.
“Thanks,” he said.
“I've tried to make a go of it, really I
have. I've spent the last eight years in Istanbul,
writing papers on my missions, about the communities. I did some
followup studies, interviews. No one was interested. Not even me. I
smoked a lot of hash. It didn't help. So, one morning I
woke up and went to the bazaar and said good bye to the friends
I'd made there. Then I went to a pharmacy and had the
man make me up a lethal injection. He wished me good luck and I went
back to my rooms. I sat there with the hypo all afternoon, then I
decided to sleep on it, and I got up the next morning and did it all
over again. I looked inside myself, and I saw that I didn't
have the guts. I just didn't have the guts. I've
stared down the barrels of a hundred guns, had a thousand knives
pressed up against my throat, but I didn't have the guts
to press that button.”

“You were too late,” Lil
said.

We both turned to look at her.

“You were a decade too late. Look at you. You're
pathetic. If you killed yourself right now, you'd just
be a washed-up loser who couldn't hack it. If you'd
done it ten years earlier, you would've been going out
on top—a champion, retiring permanently.” She set her mug down with a harder-than-necessary clunk.

Sometimes, Lil and I are right on the same wavelength. Sometimes,
it's like she's on a different planet. All I
could do was sit there, horrified, and she was happy to discuss the
timing of my pal's suicide.

But she was right. Dan nodded heavily, and I saw that he knew it,
too.

She looked at me like I was being deliberately stupid. “He's
got to get back on top. Cleaned up, dried out, into some productive
work. Get that Whuffie up, too. Then he can kill himself
with dignity.”

It was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. Dan,
though, was cocking an eyebrow at her and thinking hard. “How
old did you say you were?” he
asked.

“Twenty-three,” she
said.

“Wish I'd had your smarts at
twenty-three,” he said, and heaved
a sigh, straightening up. “Can I stay here while I get
the job done?”

I looked askance at Lil, who considered for a moment, then
nodded.

“Sure, pal, sure,” I
said. I clapped him on the shoulder. “You look beat.”

“Beat doesn't begin to cover it,” he said.

“Good night, then,” I
said.

CHAPTER 2

Ad-hocracy works well, for the most part. Lil's folks
had taken over the running of Liberty Square with a group of other
interested, compatible souls. They did a fine job, racked up gobs of
Whuffie, and anyone who came around and tried to take it over would
be so reviled by the guests they wouldn't find a pot to
piss in. Or they'd have such a wicked, radical approach
that they'd ouster Lil's parents and their
pals, and do a better job.

It can break down, though. There were pretenders to the
throne—a group who'd worked with the
original ad-hocracy and then had moved off to other pursuits—some
of them had gone to school, some of them had made movies, written
books, or gone off to Disneyland Beijing to help start things up. A
few had deadheaded for a couple decades.

They came back to Liberty Square with a message: update the
attractions. The Liberty Square ad-hocs were the staunchest
conservatives in the Magic Kingdom, preserving the wheezing
technology in the face of a Park that changed almost daily. The
newcomer/old-timers were on-side with the rest of the Park, had
their support, and looked like they might make a successful go of
it.

So it fell to Lil to make sure that there were no bugs in the
meager attractions of Liberty Square: the Hall of the Presidents,
the Liberty Belle riverboat, and the glorious Haunted Mansion,
arguably the coolest attraction to come from the fevered minds of
the old-time Disney Imagineers.

I caught her backstage at the Hall of the Presidents, tinkering
with Lincoln II, the backup animatronic. Lil tried to keep two of
everything running at speed, just in case. She could swap out a dead
bot for a backup in five minutes flat, which is all that
crowd-control would permit.

It had been two weeks since Dan's arrival, and though
I'd barely seen him in that time, his presence was vivid
in our lives. Our little ranch-house had a new smell, not
unpleasant, of rejuve and hope and loss, something barely noticeable
over the tropical flowers nodding in front of our porch. My phone
rang three or four times a day, Dan checking in from his rounds of
the Park, seeking out some way to accumulate personal capital. His
excitement and dedication to the task were inspiring, pulling me
into his over-the-top-and-damn-the-torpedoes mode of being.

“You just missed Dan,” she
said. She had her head in Lincoln's chest, working with
an autosolder and a magnifier. Bent over, red hair tied back in a
neat bun, sweat sheening her wiry freckled arms, smelling of
girl-sweat and machine lubricant, she made me wish there were a
mattress somewhere backstage. I settled for patting her behind
affectionately, and she wriggled appreciatively. “He's
looking better.”

His rejuve had taken him back to apparent 25, the way I
remembered him. He was rawboned and leathery, but still had the
defeated stoop that had startled me when I saw him at the
Adventurer's Club. “What did he want?”

“He's been hanging out with Debra—he
wanted to make sure I knew what she's up to.”

Debra was one of the old guard, a former comrade of Lil's
parents. She'd spent a decade in Disneyland Beijing,
coding sim-rides. If she had her way, we'd tear down
every marvelous rube goldberg in the Park and replace them with
pristine white sim boxes on giant, articulated servos.

The problem was that she was really good at coding sims.
Her Great Movie Ride rehab at MGM was breathtaking—the
Star Wars sequence had already inspired a hundred fan-sites that
fielded millions of hits.

She'd leveraged her success into a deal with the
Adventureland ad-hocs to rehab the Pirates of the Caribbean, and
their backstage areas were piled high with reference: treasure
chests and cutlasses and bowsprits. It was terrifying to walk
through; the Pirates was the last ride Walt personally supervised,
and we'd thought it was sacrosanct. But Debra had built
a Pirates sim in Beijing, based on Chend I Sao, the XIXth century
Chinese pirate queen, which was credited with rescuing the Park from
obscurity and ruin. The Florida iteration would incorporate the best
aspects of its Chinese cousin—the AI-driven sims that
communicated with each other and with the guests, greeting them by
name each time they rode and spinning age-appropriate tales of
piracy on the high seas; the spectacular fly-through of the aquatic
necropolis of rotting junks on the sea-floor; the thrilling pitch
and yaw of the sim as it weathered a violent, breath-taking
storm—but with Western themes: wafts of Jamaican pepper
sauce crackling through the air; liquid Afro-Caribbean accents; and
swordfights conducted in the manner of the pirates who plied the
blue waters of the New World. Identical sims would stack like
cordwood in the space currently occupied by the bulky ride-apparatus
and dioramas, quintupling capacity and halving load-time.

“So, what's she up to?”

Lil extracted herself from the Rail-Splitter's
mechanical guts and made a comical moue of worry. “She's
rehabbing the Pirates—and doing an incredible job.
They're ahead of schedule, they've got good
net-buzz, the focus groups are cumming themselves.” The comedy went out of her expression, baring genuine worry.

She turned away and closed up Honest Abe, then fired her finger
at him. Smoothly, he began to run through his spiel, silent but for
the soft hum and whine of his servos. Lil mimed twiddling a knob and
his audiotrack kicked in low: “All the armies of Europe,
Asia, and Africa combined could not, by force, make a track
on the Blue Ridge, nor take a drink from the Ohio. If destruction be
our lot, then we ourselves must be its author—and its
finisher.” She mimed turning down
the gain and he fell silent again.

“You said it, Mr. President,” she said, and fired her finger at him again, powering him
down. She bent and adjusted his hand-sewn period topcoat, then
carefully wound and set the turnip-watch in his vest-pocket.

I put my arm around her shoulders. “You're
doing all you can—and it's good work,” I said. I'd fallen into the easy castmember mode
of speaking, voicing bland affirmations. Hearing the words, I felt a
flush of embarrassment. I pulled her into a long, hard hug and
fumbled for better reassurance. Finding no words that would do, I
gave her a final squeeze and let her go.

She looked at me sidelong and nodded her head. “It'll
be fine, of course,” she said. “I
mean, the worst possible scenario is that Debra will do her job
very, very well, and make things even better than they are now.
That's not so bad.”

This was a 180-degree reversal of her position on the subject the
last time we'd talked, but you don't live
more than a century without learning when to point out that sort of
thing and when not to.

My cochlea struck twelve noon and a HUD appeared with my weekly
backup reminder. Lil was maneuvering Ben Franklin II out of his
niche. I waved good-bye at her back and walked away, to an uplink
terminal. Once I was close enough for secure broadband
communications, I got ready to back up. My cochlea chimed again and
I answered it.

“Yes,” I
subvocalized, impatiently. I hated getting distracted from a
backup—one of my enduring fears was that I'd
forget the backup altogether and leave myself vulnerable for an
entire week until the next reminder. I'd lost the knack
of getting into habits in my adolescence, giving in completely to
machine-generated reminders over conscious choice.

“It's Dan.” I
heard the sound of the Park in full swing behind him—children's
laughter; bright, recorded animatronic spiels; the tromp of
thousands of feet. “Can you meet me at the Tiki Room?
It's pretty important.”

“Can it wait for fifteen?” I
asked.

“Sure—see you in fifteen.”

I rung off and initiated the backup. A status-bar zipped across a
HUD, dumping the parts of my memory that were purely digital; then
it finished and started in on organic memory. My eyes rolled back in
my head and my life flashed before my eyes.

CHAPTER 3

The Bitchun Society has had much experience with restores from
backup—in the era of the cure for death, people live
pretty recklessly. Some people get refreshed a couple dozen times a
year.

Not me. I hate the process. Not so much that I won't
participate in it. Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra
on that subject just, you know, died, a generation before.
The Bitchun Society didn't need to convert its
detractors, just outlive them.

The first time I died, it was not long after my sixtieth
birthday. I was SCUBA diving at Playa Coral, near Veradero, Cuba. Of
course, I don't remember the incident, but knowing my
habits at that particular dive-site and having read the dive-logs of
my SCUBA-buddies, I've reconstructed the events.

I was eeling my way through the lobster-caves, with a borrowed
bottle and mask. I'd also borrowed a wetsuit, but I
wasn't wearing it—the blood-temp salt water
was balm, and I hated erecting barriers between it and my skin. The
caves were made of coral and rocks, and they coiled and twisted like
intestines. Through each hole and around each corner, there was a
hollow, rough sphere of surpassing, alien beauty. Giant lobsters
skittered over the walls and through the holes. Schools of fish as
bright as jewels darted and executed breath-taking precision
maneuvers as I disturbed their busy days. I do some of my best
thinking under water, and I'm often slipping off into
dangerous reverie at depth. Normally, my diving buddies ensure that
I don't hurt myself, but this time I got away from them,
spidering forward into a tiny hole.

Where I got stuck.

My diving buddies were behind me, and I rapped on my bottle with
the hilt of my knife until one of them put a hand on my shoulder. My
buddies saw what was up, and attempted to pull me loose, but my
bottle and buoyancy-control vest were firmly wedged. The others
exchanged hand signals, silently debating the best way to get me
loose. Suddenly, I was thrashing and kicking, and then I disappeared
into the cave, minus my vest and bottle. I'd apparently
attempted to cut through my vest's straps and managed to
sever the tube of my regulator. After inhaling a jolt of sea water,
I'd thrashed free into the cave, rolling into a
monstrous patch of spindly fire-coral. I'd inhaled
another lungful of water and kicked madly for a tiny hole in the
cave's ceiling, whence my buddies retrieved me shortly
thereafter, drowned-blue except for the patchy red welts from the
stinging coral.

In those days, making a backup was a lot more complicated; the
procedure took most of a day, and had to be undertaken at a special
clinic. Luckily, I'd had one made just before I left for
Cuba, a few weeks earlier. My next-most-recent backup was three
years old, dating from the completion of my second symphony.

They recovered me from backup and into a force-grown clone at
Toronto General. As far as I knew, I'd laid down in the
backup clinic one moment and arisen the next. It took most of a year
to get over the feeling that the whole world was putting a monstrous
joke over on me, that the drowned corpse I'd seen was
indeed my own. In my mind, the rebirth was figurative as well as
literal—the missing time was enough that I found myself
hard-pressed to socialize with my pre-death friends.

I told Dan the story during our first friendship, and he
immediately pounced on the fact that I'd gone to Disney
World to spend a week sorting out my feelings, reinventing myself,
moving to space, marrying a crazy lady. He found it very curious
that I always rebooted myself at Disney World. When I told him that
I was going to live there someday, he asked me if that would mean
that I was done reinventing myself. Sometimes, as I ran my fingers
through Lil's sweet red curls, I thought of that remark
and sighed great gusts of contentment and marveled that my friend
Dan had been so prescient.

The next time I died, they'd improved the technology
somewhat. I'd had a massive stroke in my seventy-third
year, collapsing on the ice in the middle of a house-league hockey
game. By the time they cut my helmet away, the hematomae had crushed
my brain into a pulpy, blood-sotted mess. I'd been lax
in backing up, and I lost most of a year. But they woke me gently,
with a computer-generated precis of the events of the missing
interval, and a counselor contacted me daily for a year until I felt
at home again in my skin. Again, my life rebooted, and I found
myself in Disney World, methodically flensing away the relationships
I'd built and starting afresh in Boston, living on the
ocean floor and working the heavy-metal harvesters, a project that
led, eventually, to my Chem thesis at U of T.

After I was shot dead at the Tiki Room, I had the opportunity to
appreciate the great leaps that restores had made in the intervening
ten years. I woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the events that
led up to my third death as seen from various third-party POVs:
security footage from the Adventureland cameras, synthesized
memories extracted from Dan's own backup, and a
computer-generated fly-through of the scene. I woke feeling
preternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowing that I felt that way
because of certain temporary neurotransmitter presets that had been
put in place when I was restored.

Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil's tired, smiling
face was limned with hairs that had snuck loose of her ponytail. She
took my hand and kissed the smooth knuckles. Dan smiled beneficently
at me and I was seized with a warm, comforting feeling of being
surrounded by people who really loved me. I dug for words
appropriate to the scene, decided to wing it, opened my mouth and
said, to my surprise, “I have to pee.”

Dan and Lil smiled at each other. I lurched out of the bed,
naked, and thumped to the bathroom. My muscles were wonderfully
limber, with a brand-new spring to them. After I flushed I leaned
over and took hold of my ankles, then pulled my head right to the
floor, feeling the marvelous flexibility of my back and legs and
buttocks. A scar on my knee was missing, as were the many lines that
had crisscrossed my fingers. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that
my nose and earlobes were smaller and perkier. The familiar
crow's-feet and the frown-lines between my eyebrows were
gone. I had a day's beard all over—head,
face, pubis, arms, legs. I ran my hands over my body and chuckled at
the ticklish newness of it all. I was briefly tempted to depilate
all over, just to keep this feeling of newness forever, but the
neurotransmitter presets were evaporating and a sense of urgency
over my murder was creeping up on me.

I tied a towel around my waist and made my way back to the
bedroom. The smells of tile-cleaner and flowers and rejuve were
bright in my nose, effervescent as camphor. Dan and Lil stood when I
came into the room and helped me to the bed. “Well, this
sucks,” I said.

I'd gone straight from the uplink through the
utilidors—three quick cuts of security cam footage, one
at the uplink, one in the corridor, and one at the exit in the
underpass between Liberty Square and Adventureland. I seemed bemused
and a little sad as I emerged from the door, and began to weave my
way through the crowd, using a kind of sinuous, darting shuffle that
I'd developed when I was doing field-work on my
crowd-control thesis. I cut rapidly through the lunchtime crowd
toward the long roof of the Tiki Room, thatched with strips of
shimmering aluminum cut and painted to look like long grass.

Fuzzy shots now, from Dan's POV, of me moving closer
to him, passing close to a group of teenaged girls with extra elbows
and knees, wearing environmentally controlled cloaks and cowls
covered with Epcot Center logomarks. One of them is wearing a pith
helmet, from the Jungle Traders shop outside of the Jungle Cruise.
Dan's gaze flicks away, to the Tiki Room's
entrance, where there is a short queue of older men, then back, just
as the girl with the pith helmet draws a stylish little organic
pistol, like a penis with a tail that coils around her arm.
Casually, grinning, she raises her arm and gestures with the pistol,
exactly like Lil does with her finger when she's
uploading, and the pistol lunges forward. Dan's gaze
flicks back to me. I'm pitching over, my lungs bursting
out of my chest and spreading before me like wings, spinal gristle
and viscera showering the guests before me. A piece of my nametag,
now shrapnel, strikes Dan in the forehead, causing him to blink.
When he looks again, the group of girls is still there, but the girl
with the pistol is long gone.

The fly-through is far less confused. Everyone except me, Dan and
the girl is grayed-out. We're limned in highlighter
yellow, moving in slow-motion. I emerge from the underpass and the
girl moves from the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse to the group of
her friends. Dan starts to move towards me. The girl raises, arms
and fires her pistol. The self-guiding smart-slug, keyed to my body
chemistry, flies low, near ground level, weaving between the feet of
the crowd, moving just below the speed of sound. When it reaches me,
it screams upwards and into my spine, detonating once it's
entered my chest cavity.

The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward the
Adventureland/Main Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up,
following her as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking
and weaving between them, moving toward the breezeway at Sleeping
Beauty Castle. She vanishes, then reappears, forty minutes later, in
Tomorrowland, near the new Space Mountain complex, then disappears
again.

“Has anyone ID'd the girl?” I asked, once I'd finished reliving the events.
The anger was starting to boil within me now. My new fists clenched
for the first time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips.

Dan shook his head. “None of the girls she was with
had ever seen her before. The face was one of the Seven
Sisters—Hope.” The
Seven Sisters were a trendy collection of designer faces. Every
second teenage girl wore one of them.

“How about Jungle Traders?” I asked. “Did they have a record of the pith
helmet purchase?”

Lil frowned. “We ran the Jungle Traders purchases back
for six months: only three matched the girl's apparent
age; all three have alibis. Chances are she stole it.”

“Why?” I asked,
finally. In my mind's eye, I saw my lungs bursting out
of my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying like
shrapnel. I saw the girl's smile, an almost sexual smirk
as she pulled the trigger on me.

“It wasn't random,” Lil said. “The slug was definitely keyed to
you—that means that she'd gotten close to
you at some point.”

Right—which meant that she'd been to
Disney World in the last ten years. That narrowed it down, all
right.

“What happened to her after Tomorrowland?” I said.

“We don't know,” Lil said. “Something wrong with the cameras. We
lost her and she never reappeared.” She
sounded hot and angry—she took equipment failures in the
Magic Kingdom personally.

“Who'd want to do this?” I asked, hating the self-pity in my voice. It was the first
time I'd been murdered, but I didn't need to
be a drama-queen about it.

Dan's eyes got a far-away look. “Sometimes,
people do things for reasons that seem perfectly reasonable to them,
that the rest of the world couldn't hope to understand.
I've seen a few assassinations, and they never made
sense afterwards.” He stroked his
chin. “Sometimes, it's better to look for
temperament, rather than motivation: who could do something
like this?”

Right. All we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths
who'd visited the Magic Kingdom in ten years. That
narrowed it down considerably. I pulled up a HUD and checked the
time. It had been four days since my murder. I had a shift coming
up, working the turnstiles at the Haunted Mansion. I liked to pull a
couple of those shifts a month, just to keep myself grounded; it
helped to take a reality check while I was churning away in the
rarified climate of my crowd-control simulations.

I stood and went to my closet, started to dress.

“What are you doing?” Lil asked, alarmed.

“I've got a shift. I'm running
late.”

“You're in no shape to work,” Lil said, tugging at my elbow. I jerked free of her.

“I'm fine—good as new.” I barked a humorless laugh. “I'm not
going to let those bastards disrupt my life any more.”

Those bastards? I thought—when had I decided
that there was more than one? But I knew it was true. There was no
way that this was all planned by one person: it had been executed
too precisely, too thoroughly.

Dan moved to block the bedroom door. “Wait a
second,” he said. “You
need rest.”

I fixed him with a doleful glare. “I'll
decide that,” I said. He stepped
aside.

“I'll tag along, then,” he said. “Just in case.”

I pinged my Whuffie. I was up a couple percentiles—sympathy
Whuffie—but it was falling: Dan and Lil were radiating
disapproval. Screw 'em.

I got into my runabout and Dan scrambled for the passenger door
as I put it in gear and sped out.

“Are you sure you're all right?” Dan said as I nearly rolled the runabout taking the corner at
the end of our cul-de-sac.

“Why wouldn't I be?” I said. “I'm as good as new.”

“Funny choice of words,” he
said. “Some would say that you were new.”

I groaned. “Not this argument again,” I said. “I feel like me and no one else is making
that claim. Who cares if I've been restored from a
backup?”

“All I'm saying is, there's a
difference between you and an exact copy of you, isn't
there?”

I knew what he was doing, distracting me with one of our old
fights, but I couldn't resist the bait, and as I
marshalled my arguments, it actually helped calm me down some. Dan
was that kind of friend, a person who knew you better than you knew
yourself. “So you're saying that if you were
obliterated and then recreated, atom-for-atom, that you wouldn't
be you anymore?”

“For the sake of argument, sure. Being destroyed and
recreated is different from not being destroyed at all, right?”

“Brush up on your quantum mechanics, pal. You're
being destroyed and recreated a trillion times a second.”

“On a very, very small level—”

“What difference does that make?”

“Fine, I'll concede that. But you're
not really an atom-for-atom copy. You're a clone, with a
copied brain—that's not the same as
quantum destruction.”

“Very nice thing to say to someone who's
just been murdered, pal. You got a problem with clones?”

And we were off and running.

The Mansion's cast were sickeningly cheerful and
solicitous. Each of them made a point of coming around and touching
the stiff, starched shoulder of my butler's costume,
letting me know that if there was anything they could do for me… I gave them all a fixed smile and tried to concentrate on the guests,
how they waited, when they arrived, how they dispersed through the
exit gate. Dan hovered nearby, occasionally taking the eight minute,
twenty-two second ride-through, running interference for me with the
other castmembers.

He was nearby when my break came up. I changed into civvies and
we walked over the cobbled streets, past the Hall of the Presidents,
noting as I rounded the corner that there was something different
about the queue-area. Dan groaned. “They did it
already,” he said.

I looked closer. The turnstiles were blocked by a sandwich board:
Mickey in a Ben Franklin wig and bifocals, holding a trowel.
“Excuse our mess!” the
sign declared. “We're renovating to serve you
better!”

I spotted one of Debra's cronies standing behind the
sign, a self-satisfied smile on his face. He'd started
off life as a squat, northern Chinese, but had had his bones
lengthened and his cheekbones raised so that he looked almost elfin.
I took one look at his smile and understood—Debra had
established a toehold in Liberty Square.

“They filed plans for the new Hall with the steering
committee an hour after you got shot. The committee loved the plans;
so did the net. They're promising not to touch the
Mansion.”

“You didn't mention this,” I said, hotly.

“We thought you'd jump to conclusions. The
timing was bad, but there's no indication that they
arranged for the shooter. Everyone's got an alibi;
furthermore, they've all offered to submit their backups
for proof.”

“Right,” I said.
“Right. So they just happened to have plans for
a new Hall standing by. And they just happened to file them
after I got shot, when all our ad-hocs were busy worrying about me.
It's all a big coincidence.”

Dan shook his head. “We're not stupid,
Jules. No one thinks that it's a coincidence. Debra's
the sort of person who keeps a lot of plans standing by, just in
case. But that just makes her a well-prepared opportunist, not a
murderer.”

I felt nauseated and exhausted. I was enough of a castmember that
I sought out a utilidor before I collapsed against a wall, head
down. Defeat seeped through me, saturating me.

Dan crouched down beside me. I looked over at him. He was
grinning wryly. “Posit,” he
said, “for the moment, that Debra really did do this
thing, set you up so that she could take over.”

I smiled, in spite of myself. This was his explaining act, the
thing he would do whenever I fell into one of his rhetorical tricks
back in the old days. “All right, I've
posited it.”

“Why would she: one, take out you instead of Lil or
one of the real old-timers; two, go after the Hall of Presidents
instead of Tom Sawyer Island or even the Mansion; and three, follow
it up with such a blatant, suspicious move?”

“All right,” I said,
warming to the challenge. “One: I'm important
enough to be disruptive but not so important as to rate a full
investigation. Two: Tom Sawyer Island is too visible, you can't
rehab it without people seeing the dust from shore. Three, Debra's
coming off of a decade in Beijing, where subtlety isn't
real important.”

“Sure,” Dan said,
“sure.” Then he launched
an answering salvo, and while I was thinking up my answer, he helped
me to my feet and walked me out to my runabout, arguing all the way,
so that by the time I noticed we weren't at the Park
anymore, I was home and in bed.

With all the Hall's animatronics mothballed for the
duration, Lil had more time on her hands than she knew what to do
with. She hung around the little bungalow, the two of us in the
living room, staring blankly at the windows, breathing shallowly in
the claustrophobic, superheated Florida air. I had my working notes
on queue management for the Mansion, and I pecked at them aimlessly.
Sometimes, Lil mirrored my HUD so she could watch me work, and made
suggestions based on her long experience.

It was a delicate process, this business of increasing throughput
without harming the guest experience. But for every second I could
shave off of the queue-to-exit time, I could put another sixty
guests through and lop thirty seconds off total wait-time. And the
more guests who got to experience the Mansion, the more of a
Whuffie-hit Debra's people would suffer if they made a
move on it. So I dutifully pecked at my notes, and found three
seconds I could shave off the graveyard sequence by swiveling the
Doom Buggy carriages stage-left as they descended from the attic
window: by expanding their fields-of-vision, I could expose the
guests to all the scenes more quickly.

I ran the change in fly-through, then implemented it after
closing and invited the other Liberty Square ad-hocs to come and
test it out.

It was another muggy winter evening, prematurely dark. The
ad-hocs had enough friends and family with them that we were able to
simulate an off-peak queue-time, and we all stood and sweated in the
preshow area, waiting for the doors to swing open, listening to the
wolf-cries and assorted boo-spookery from the hidden speakers.

The doors swung open, revealing Lil in a rotting maid's
uniform, her eyes lined with black, her skin powdered to a deathly
pallor. She gave us a cold, considering glare, then intoned,
“Master Gracey requests more bodies.”

As we crowded into the cool, musty gloom of the parlor, Lil
contrived to give my ass an affectionate squeeze. I turned to return
the favor, and saw Debra's elfin comrade looming over
Lil's shoulder. My smile died on my lips.

The man locked eyes with me for a moment, and I saw something in
there—some admixture of cruelty and worry that I
didn't know what to make of. He looked away immediately.
I'd known that Debra would have spies in the crowd, of
course, but with elf-boy watching, I resolved to make this the best
show I knew how.

It's subtle, this business of making the show better
from within. Lil had already slid aside the paneled wall that led to
stretch-room number two, the most recently serviced one. Once the
crowd had moved inside, I tried to lead their eyes by adjusting my
body language to poses of subtle attention directed at the new
spotlights. When the newly remastered soundtrack came from behind
the sconce-bearing gargoyles at the corners of the octagonal room, I
leaned my body slightly in the direction of the moving stereo-image.
And an instant before the lights snapped out, I ostentatiously cast
my eyes up into the scrim ceiling, noting that others had taken my
cue, so they were watching when the UV-lit corpse dropped from the
pitch-dark ceiling, jerking against the noose at its neck.

The crowd filed into the second queue area, where they boarded
the Doom Buggies. There was a low buzz of marveling conversation as
we made our way onto the moving sidewalk. I boarded my Doom Buggy
and an instant later, someone slid in beside me. It was the elf.

He made a point of not making eye contact with me, but I sensed
his sidelong glances at me as we rode through past the floating
chandelier and into the corridor where the portraits'
eyes watched us. Two years before, I'd accelerated this
sequence and added some random swivel to the Doom Buggies, shaving
25 seconds off the total, taking the hourly throughput cap from 2365
to 2600. It was the proof-of-concept that led to all the other
seconds I'd shaved away since. The violent pitching of
the Buggy brought me and the elf into inadvertent contact with one
another, and when I brushed his hand as I reached for the safety
bar, I felt that it was cold and sweaty.

He was nervous! He was nervous. What did he
have to be nervous about? I was the one who'd been
murdered—maybe he was nervous because he was supposed to
finish the job. I cast my own sidelong looks at him, trying to see
suspicious bulges in his tight clothes, but the Doom Buggy's
pebbled black plastic interior was too dim. Dan was in the Buggy
behind us, with one of the Mansion's regular
castmembers. I rang his cochlea and subvocalized: “Get
ready to jump out on my signal.” Anyone
leaving their Buggy would interrupt an infrared beam and stop the
ride system. I knew I could rely on Dan to trust me without a lot of
explaining, which meant that I could keep a close watch on Debra's
crony.

We went past the hallway of mirrors and into the hallway of
doors, where monstrous hands peeked out around the sills, straining
against the hinges, recorded groans mixed in with pounding. I
thought about it—if I wanted to kill someone on the
Mansion, what would be the best place to do it? The attic
staircase-- the next sequence—seemed like a good bet. A
cold clarity washed over me. The elf would kill me in the gloom of
the staircase, dump me out over the edge at the blind turn toward
the graveyard, and that would be it. Would he be able to do it if I
were staring straight at him? He seemed terribly nervous as it was.
I swiveled in my seat and looked him straight in the eye.

He quirked half a smile at me and nodded a greeting. I kept on
staring at him, my hands balled into fists, ready for anything. We
rode down the staircase, facing up, listening to the clamour of
voices from the cemetery and the squawk of the red-eyed raven. I
caught sight of the quaking groundkeeper animatronic from the corner
of my eye and startled. I let out a subvocal squeal and was pitched
forward as the ride system shuddered to a stop.

“Jules?” came Dan's
voice in my cochlea. “You all right?”

He'd heard my involuntary note of surprise and had
leapt clear of the Buggy, stopping the ride. The elf was looking at
me with a mixture of surprise and pity.

“It's all right, it's all
right. False alarm.” I paged Lil
and subvocalized to her, telling her to start up the ride ASAP, it
was all right.

I rode the rest of the way with my hands on the safety bar, my
eyes fixed ahead of me, steadfastly ignoring the elf. I checked the
timer I'd been running. The demo was a debacle—instead
of shaving off three seconds, I'd added thirty. I wanted
to cry.

I debarked the Buggy and stalked quickly out of the exit queue,
leaning heavily against the fence, staring blindly at the pet
cemetery. My head swam: I was out of control, jumping at shadows. I
was spooked.

And I had no reason to be. Sure, I'd been murdered,
but what had it cost me? A few days of “unconsciousness” while they decanted my backup into my new body, a merciful
gap in memory from my departure at the backup terminal up until my
death. I wasn't one of those nuts who took death
seriously. It wasn't like they'd
done something permanent.

In the meantime, I had done something permanent: I'd
dug Lil's grave a little deeper, endangered the
ad-hocracy and, worst of all, the Mansion. I'd acted
like an idiot. I tasted my dinner, a wolfed-down hamburger, and
swallowed hard, forcing down the knob of nausea.

I sensed someone at my elbow, and thinking it was Lil, come to
ask me what had gone on, I turned with a sheepish grin and found
myself facing the elf.

He stuck his hand out and spoke in the flat no-accent of someone
running a language module. “Hi there. We haven't
been introduced, but I wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your
work. I'm Tim Fung.”

I pumped his hand, which was still cold and particularly clammy
in the close heat of the Florida night. “Julius,” I said, startled at how much like a bark it sounded. Careful,
I thought, no need to escalate the hostilities. “It's
kind of you to say that. I like what you-all have done with the
Pirates.”

He smiled: a genuine, embarrassed smile, as though he'd
just been given high praise from one of his heroes. “Really?
I think it's pretty good—the second time
around you get a lot of chances to refine things, really clarify the
vision. Beijing—well, it was exciting, but it was
rushed, you know? I mean, we were really struggling. Every day,
there was another pack of squatters who wanted to tear the Park
down. Debra used to send me out to give the children piggyback
rides, just to keep our Whuffie up while she was evicting the
squatters. It was good to have the opportunity to refine the
designs, revisit them without the floor show.”

I knew about this, of course—Beijing had been a real
struggle for the ad-hocs who built it. Lots of them had been killed,
many times over. Debra herself had been killed every day for a week
and restored to a series of prepared clones, beta-testing one of the
ride systems. It was faster than revising the CAD simulations. Debra
had a reputation for pursuing expedience.

“I'm starting to find out how it feels to
work under pressure,” I said, and
nodded significantly at the Mansion. I was gratified to see him look
embarrassed, then horrified.

“We would never touch the Mansion,” he said. “It's perfect!”

Dan and Lil sauntered up as I was preparing a riposte. They both
looked concerned—now that I thought of it, they'd
both seemed incredibly concerned about me since the day I was
revived.

Dan's gait was odd, stilted, like he was leaning on
Lil for support. They looked like a couple. An irrational sear of
jealousy jetted through me. I was an emotional wreck. Still, I took
Lil's big, scarred hand in mine as soon as she was in
reach, then cuddled her to me protectively. She had changed out of
her maid's uniform into civvies: smart coveralls whose
micropore fabric breathed in time with her own respiration.

“Lil, Dan, I want you to meet Tim Fung. He was just
telling me war stories from the Pirates project in Beijing.”

It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was
normally an instantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was
still disoriented. I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed
Whuffie; respect garnered from people who shared very few of my
opinions. I expected that. What I didn't expect was that
his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lent extra credence to the
rankings of people I respected, was also high—higher
than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior even more. Respect
from the elf—Tim, I had to remember to call him
Tim—would carry a lot of weight in every camp that
mattered.

Dan's score was incrementing upwards, but he still
had a rotten profile. He had accrued a good deal of left-handed
Whuffie, and I curiously backtraced it to the occasion of my murder,
when Debra's people had accorded him a generous dollop
of props for the levelheaded way he had scraped up my corpse and
moved it offstage, minimizing the disturbance in front of their
wondrous Pirates.

I was fugueing, wandering off on the kind of mediated reverie
that got me killed on the reef at Playa Coral, and I came out of it
with a start, realizing that the other three were politely ignoring
my blown buffer. I could have run backwards through my short-term
memory to get the gist of the conversation, but that would have
lengthened the pause. Screw it. “So, how're
things going over at the Hall of the Presidents?” I asked Tim.

Lil shot me a cautioning look. She'd ceded the Hall
to Debra's ad-hocs, that being the only way to avoid the
appearance of childish disattention to the almighty Whuffie. Now she
had to keep up the fiction of good-natured cooperation—that
meant not shoulder-surfing Debra, looking for excuses to pounce on
her work.

Tim gave us the same half-grin he'd greeted me with.
On his smooth, pointed features, it looked almost irredeemably cute.
“We're doing good stuff, I think. Debra's
had her eye on the Hall for years, back in the old days, before she
went to China. We're replacing the whole thing with
broadband uplinks of gestalts from each of the Presidents'
lives: newspaper headlines, speeches, distilled biographies,
personal papers. It'll be like having each President
inside you, core-dumped in a few seconds. Debra said
we're going to flash-bake the Presidents on
your mind!” His eyes glittered in
the twilight.

Having only recently experienced my own cerebral flash-baking,
Tim's description struck a chord in me. My personality
seemed to be rattling around a little in my mind, as though it had
been improperly fitted. It made the idea of having the gestalt of
50-some Presidents squashed in along with it perversely appealing.

“Wow,” I said.
“That sounds wild. What do you have in mind for physical
plant?” The Hall as it stood had a
quiet, patriotic dignity cribbed from a hundred official buildings
of the dead USA. Messing with it would be like redesigning the
stars-and-bars.

“That's not really my area,” Tim said. “I'm a programmer. But I
could have one of the designers squirt some plans at you, if you
want.”

“That would be fine,” Lil
said, taking my elbow. “I think we should be heading
home, now, though.” She began to
tug me away. Dan took my other elbow. Behind her, the Liberty Belle
glowed like a ghostly wedding cake in the twilight.

“That's too bad,” Tim said. “My ad-hoc is pulling an all-nighter on
the new Hall. I'm sure they'd love to have
you drop by.”

The idea seized hold of me. I would go into the camp of the
enemy, sit by their fire, learn their secrets. “That
would be great!” I said,
too loudly. My head was buzzing slightly. Lil's hands
fell away.

“But we've got an early morning
tomorrow,” Lil said. “You've
got a shift at eight, and I'm running into town for
groceries.” She was lying, but she
was telling me that this wasn't her idea of a smart
move. But my faith was unshakeable.

“Eight a.m. shift? No problem—I'll
be right here when it starts. I'll just grab a shower at
the Contemporary in the morning and catch the monorail back in time
to change. All right?”

Dan tried. “But Jules, we were going to grab some
dinner at Cinderella's Royal Table, remember? I made
reservations.”

“Aw, we can eat any time,” I
said. “This is a hell of an opportunity.”

“It sure is,” Dan
said, giving up. “Mind if I come along?”

He and Lil traded meaningful looks that I interpreted to mean, If
he's going to be a nut, one of us really should stay
with him. I was past caring—I was going to beard
the lion in his den!

Tim was apparently oblivious to all of this. “Then
it's settled! Let's go.”

On the walk to the Hall, Dan kept ringing my cochlea and I kept
sending him straight to voicemail. All the while, I kept up a patter
of small-talk with him and Tim. I was determined to make up for my
debacle in the Mansion with Tim, win him over.

Debra's people were sitting around in the armchairs
onstage, the animatronic presidents stacked in neat piles in the
wings. Debra was sprawled in Lincoln's armchair, her
head cocked lazily, her legs extended before her. The Hall's
normal smells of ozone and cleanliness were overridden by sweat and
machine-oil, the stink of an ad-hoc pulling an all-nighter. The Hall
took fifteen years to research and execute, and a couple of days to
tear down.

She was au-naturel, still wearing the face she'd been
born with, albeit one that had been regenerated dozens of times
after her deaths. It was patrician, waxy, long, with a nose that was
made for staring down. She was at least as old as I was, though she
was only apparent 22. I got the sense that she picked this age
because it was one that afforded boundless reserves of energy.

She didn't deign to rise as I approached, but she did
nod languorously at me. The other ad-hocs had been split into little
clusters, hunched over terminals. They all had the raccoon-eyed,
sleep-deprived look of fanatics, even Debra, who managed to look
lazy and excited simultaneously.

Did you have me killed? I wondered, staring at Debra.
After all, she'd been killed dozens, if not hundreds of
times. It might not be such a big deal for her.

“Hi there,” I said,
brightly. “Tim offered to show us around! You know Dan,
right?”

Debra nodded at him. “Oh, sure. Dan and I are pals,
right?”

Dan's poker face didn't twitch a muscle.
“Hello, Debra,” he said.
He'd been hanging out with them since Lil had briefed
him on the peril to the Mansion, trying to gather some intelligence
for us to use. They knew what he was up to, of course, but Dan was a
fairly charming guy and he worked like a mule, so they tolerated
him. But it seemed like he'd violated a boundary by
accompanying me, as though the polite fiction that he was more a
part of Debra's ad-hoc than Lil's was
shattered by my presence.

Tim hustled us backstage, where Lil and I used to sweat over the
animatronics and cop surreptitious feels. Everything had been torn
loose, packed up, stacked. They hadn't wasted a
moment—they'd spent a week tearing down a
show that had run for more than a century. The scrim that the
projected portions of the show normally screened on was ground into
the floor, spotted with grime, footprints and oil.

Tim showed me to a half-assembled backup terminal. Its housing
was off, and any number of wireless keyboards, pointers and gloves
lay strewn about it. It had the look of a prototype.

“This is it—our uplink. So far, we've
got a demo app running on it: Lincoln's old speech,
along with the civil-war montage. Just switch on guest access and
I'll core-dump it to you. It's wild.”

I pulled up my HUD and switched on guest access. Tim pointed a
finger at the terminal and my brain was suffused with the essence of
Lincoln: every nuance of his speech, the painstakingly researched
movement tics, his warts and beard and topcoat. It almost felt like
I was Lincoln, for a moment, and then it passed. But I
could still taste the lingering coppery flavor of cannon-fire and
chewing tobacco.

I staggered backwards. My head swam with flash-baked
sense-impressions, rich and detailed. I knew on the spot that
Debra's Hall of the Presidents was going to be a hit.

Dan took a shot off the uplink, too. Tim and I watched him as his
expression shifted from skepticism to delight. Tim looked
expectantly at me.

“That's really fine,” I said. “Really, really fine. Moving.”

Tim blushed. “Thanks! I did the gestalt
programming—it's my specialty.”

Debra spoke up from behind him—she'd
sauntered over while Dan was getting his jolt. “I got the
idea in Beijing, when I was dying a lot. There's
something wonderful about having memories implanted, like you're
really working your brain. I love the synthetic clarity of it
all.”

I sensed deep political shoals and was composing my reply when
Debra said: “Tim keeps trying to make it all more
impressionistic, less computer-y. He's wrong, of course.
We don't want to simulate the experience of watching the
show—we want to transcend it.”

Tim nodded reluctantly. “Sure, transcend it. But the
way we do that is by making the experience human, a mile in
the presidents' shoes. Empathy-driven. What's
the point of flash-baking a bunch of dry facts on someone's
brain?”

CHAPTER 4

One night in the Hall of Presidents convinced me of three things:

That Debra's people
had had me killed, and screw their alibis,

That they would kill me again,
when the time came for them to make a play for the Haunted Mansion,

That our only hope for saving the Mansion was a preemptive
strike against them: we had to hit them hard, where it hurt.

Dan and I had been treated to eight hours of insectile precision
in the Hall of Presidents, Debra's people working with
effortless cooperation born of the adversity they'd
faced in Beijing. Debra moved from team to team, making suggestions
with body language as much as with words, leaving bursts of inspired
activity in her wake.

It was that precision that convinced me of point one. Any ad-hoc
this tight could pull off anything if it advanced their agenda.
Ad-hoc? Hell, call them what they were: an army.

Point two came to me when I sampled the Lincoln build that Tim
finished at about three in the morning, after intensive consultation
with Debra. The mark of a great ride is that it gets better the
second time around, as the detail and flourishes start to impinge on
your consciousness. The Mansion was full of little gimcracks and sly
nods that snuck into your experience on each successive ride.

Tim shuffled his feet nervously, bursting with barely restrained
pride as I switched on public access. He dumped the app to my public
directory, and, gingerly, I executed it.

God! God and Lincoln and cannon-fire and oratory and ploughs and
mules and greatcoats! It rolled over me, it punched through me, it
crashed against the inside of my skull and rebounded. The first pass
through, there had been a sense of order, of narrative, but this,
this was gestalt, the whole thing in one undifferentiated ball,
filling me and spilling over. It was panicky for a moment, as the
essence of Lincolness seemed to threaten my own personality, and,
just as it was about to overwhelm me, it receded, leaving behind a
rush of endorphin and adrenaline that made me want to jump.

“Tim,” I gasped.
“Tim! That was…” Words failed me. I wanted to hug him. What we could do for
the Mansion with this! What elegance! Directly imprinting the
experience, without recourse to the stupid, blind eyes; the thick,
deaf ears.

Tim beamed and basked, and Debra nodded solemnly from her throne.
“You liked it?” Tim
said. I nodded, and staggered back to the theatre seat where Dan
slept, head thrown back, snores softly rattling in his throat.

Incrementally, reason trickled back into my mind, and with it
came ire. How dare they? The wonderful compromises of technology and
expense that had given us the Disney rides—rides that
had entertained the world for two centuries and more—could
never compete head to head with what they were working on.

My hands knotted into fists in my lap. Why the fuck couldn't
they do this somewhere else? Why did they have to destroy everything
I loved to realize this? They could build this tech anywhere—they
could distribute it online and people could access it from their
living rooms!

But that would never do. Doing it here was better for the old
Whuffie—they'd make over Disney World and
hold it, a single ad-hoc where three hundred had flourished before,
smoothly operating a park twice the size of Manhattan.

I stood and stalked out of the theater, out into Liberty Square
and the Park. It had cooled down without drying out, and there was a
damp chill that crawled up my back and made my breath stick in my
throat. I turned to contemplate the Hall of Presidents, staid and
solid as it had been since my boyhood and before, a monument to the
Imagineers who anticipated the Bitchun Society, inspired it.

I called Dan, still snoring back in the theater, and woke him. He
grunted unintelligibly in my cochlea.

“They did it—they killed me.” I knew they had, and I was glad. It made what I had to do
next easier.

“Bullshit!” I shouted
into the empty night. “Bullshit! They did it, and they
fucked with their backups somehow. They must have. It's
all too neat and tidy. How else could they have gotten so far with
the Hall so fast? They knew it was coming, they planned a
disruption, and they moved in. Tell me that you think they just had
these plans lying around and moved on them when they could.”

Dan groaned, and I heard his joints popping. He must have been
stretching. The Park breathed around me, the sounds of maintenance
crews scurrying in the night. “I do believe that.
Clearly, you don't. It's not the first time
we've disagreed. So now what?”

“Now we save the Mansion,” I
said. “Now we fight back.”

“Oh, shit,” Dan said.

I have to admit, there was a part of me that concurred.

My opportunity came later that week. Debra's ad-hocs
were showboating, announcing a special preview of the new Hall to
the other ad-hocs that worked in the Park. It was classic chutzpah,
letting the key influencers in the Park in long before the bugs were
hammered out. A smooth run would garner the kind of impressed
reaction that guaranteed continued support while they finished up; a
failed demo could doom them. There were plenty of people in the Park
who had a sentimental attachment to the Hall of Presidents, and
whatever Debra's people came up with would have to
answer their longing.

“I'm going to do it during the demo,” I told Dan, while I piloted the runabout from home to the
castmember parking. I snuck a look at him to gauge his reaction. He
had his poker face on.

“I'm not going to tell Lil,” I continued. “It's better that she
doesn't know—plausible deniability.”

“And me?” he said.
“Don't I need plausible deniability?”

“No,” I said. “No,
you don't. You're an outsider. You can make
the case that you were working on your own—gone
rogue.” I knew it wasn't
fair. Dan was here to build up his Whuffie, and if he was implicated
in my dirty scheme, he'd have to start over again. I
knew it wasn't fair, but I didn't care. I
knew that we were fighting for our own survival. “It's
good versus evil, Dan. You don't want to be a
post-person. You want to stay human. The rides are human. We each
mediate them through our own experience. We're
physically inside of them, and they talk to us through our senses.
What Debra's people are building—it's
hive-mind shit. Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It's
not an experience, it's brainwashing! You gotta know
that.” I was pleading, arguing with
myself as much as with him.

I snuck another look at him as I sped along the Disney
back-roads, lined with sweaty Florida pines and immaculate purple
signage. Dan was looking thoughtful, the way he had back in our old
days in Toronto. Some of my tension dissipated. He was thinking
about it—I'd gotten through to him.

“Jules, this isn't one of your better
ideas.” My chest tightened, and he
patted my shoulder. He had the knack of putting me at my ease, even
when he was telling me that I was an idiot. “Even if
Debra was behind your assassination—and that's
not a certainty, we both know that. Even if that's the
case, we've got better means at our disposal. Improving
the Mansion, competing with her head to head, that's
smart. Give it a little while and we can come back at her, take over
the Hall—even the Pirates, that'd really
piss her off. Hell, if we can prove she was behind the
assassination, we can chase her off right now. Sabotage is not going
to do you any good. You've got lots of other options.”

“But none of them are fast enough, and none of them
are emotionally satisfying. This way has some goddamn balls.”

We reached castmember parking, I swung the runabout into a slot
and stalked out before it had a chance to extrude its recharger
cock. I heard Dan's door slam behind me and knew that he
was following behind.

We took to the utilidors grimly. I walked past the cameras,
knowing that my image was being archived, my presence logged. I'd
picked the timing of my raid carefully: by arriving at high noon, I
was sticking to my traditional pattern for watching hot-weather
crowd dynamics. I'd made a point of visiting twice
during the previous week at this time, and of dawdling in the
commissary before heading topside. The delay between my arrival in
the runabout and my showing up at the Mansion would not be
discrepant.

Dan dogged my heels as I swung towards the commissary, and then
hugged the wall, in the camera's blindspot. Back in my
early days in the Park, when I was courting Lil, she showed me the
A-Vac, the old pneumatic waste-disposal system, decommissioned in
the 20s. The kids who grew up in the Park had been notorious
explorers of the tubes, which still whiffed faintly of the garbage
bags they'd once whisked at 60 mph to the dump on the
property's outskirts, but for a brave, limber kid, the
tubes were a subterranean wonderland to explore when the
hypermediated experiences of the Park lost their luster.

I snarled a grin and popped open the service entrance. “If
they hadn't killed me and forced me to switch to a new
body, I probably wouldn't be flexible enough to fit
in,” I hissed at Dan. “Ironic,
huh?”

I clambered inside without waiting for a reply, and started
inching my way under the Hall of Presidents.

My plan had covered every conceivable detail, except one, which
didn't occur to me until I was forty minutes into the
pneumatic tube, arms held before me and legs angled back like a
swimmer's.

How was I going to reach into my pockets?

Specifically, how was I going to retrieve my HERF gun from my
back pants-pocket, when I couldn't even bend my elbows?
The HERF gun was the crux of the plan: a High Energy Radio Frequency
generator with a directional, focused beam that would punch up
through the floor of the Hall of Presidents and fuse every goddamn
scrap of unshielded electronics on the premises. I'd
gotten the germ of the idea during Tim's first demo,
when I'd seen all of his prototypes spread out
backstage, cases off, ready to be tinkered with. Unshielded.

“Dan,” I said, my
voice oddly muffled by the tube's walls.

“Yeah?” he said.
He'd been silent during the journey, the sound of his
painful, elbow-dragging progress through the lightless tube my only
indicator of his presence.

“Can you reach my back pocket?”

“Oh, shit,” he said.

“Goddamn it,” I said,
“keep the fucking editorial to yourself. Can you reach it
or not?”

I heard him grunt as he pulled himself up in the tube, then felt
his hand groping up my calf. Soon, his chest was crushing my calves
into the tube's floor and his hand was pawing around my
ass.

“I can reach it,” he
said. I could tell from his tone that he wasn't too
happy about my snapping at him, but I was too wrapped up to consider
an apology, despite what must be happening to my Whuffie as Dan did
his slow burn.

He fumbled the gun—a narrow cylinder as long as my
palm—out of my pocket. “Now what?” he said.

“Can you pass it up?” I
asked.

Dan crawled higher, overtop of me, but stuck fast when his
ribcage met my glutes. “I can't get any
further,” he said.

“Fine,” I said.
“You'll have to fire it, then.” I held my breath. Would he do it? It was one thing to be my
accomplice, another to be the author of the destruction.

“Aw, Jules,” he said.

“A simple yes or no, Dan. That's all I
want to hear from you.” I was
boiling with anger—at myself, at Dan, at Debra, at the
whole goddamn thing.

“Fine,” he said.

“Good. Dial it up to max dispersion and point it
straight up.”

I heard him release the catch, felt a staticky crackle in the
air, and then it was done. The gun was a one-shot, something I'd
confiscated from a mischievous guest a decade before, when they'd
had a brief vogue.

“Hang on to it,” I
said. I had no intention of leaving such a damning bit of evidence
behind. I resumed my bellycrawl forward to the next service hatch,
near the parking lot, where I'd stashed an identical
change of clothes for both of us.

We made it back just as the demo was getting underway. Debra's
ad-hocs were ranged around the mezzanine inside the Hall of
Presidents, a collection of influential castmembers from other
ad-hocs filling the pre-show area to capacity.

Dan and I filed in just as Tim was stringing the velvet rope up
behind the crowd. He gave me a genuine smile and shook my hand, and
I smiled back, full of good feelings now that I knew that he was
going down in flames. I found Lil and slipped my hand into hers as
we filed into the auditorium, which had the new-car smell of rug
shampoo and fresh electronics.

We took our seats and I bounced my leg nervously, compulsively,
while Debra, dressed in Lincoln's coat and stovepipe,
delivered a short speech. There was some kind of broadcast rig
mounted over the stage now, something to allow them to beam us all
their app in one humongous burst.

Debra finished up and stepped off the stage to a polite round of
applause, and they started the demo.

Nothing happened. I tried to keep the shit-eating grin off my
face as nothing happened. No tone in my cochlea indicating a new
file in my public directory, no rush of sensation, nothing. I turned
to Lil to make some snotty remark, but her eyes were closed, her
mouth lolling open, her breath coming in short huffs. Down the row,
every castmember was in the same attitude of deep, mind-blown
concentration. I pulled up a diagnostic HUD.

Nothing. No diagnostics. No HUD. I cold-rebooted.

Nothing.

I was offline.

Offline, I filed out of the Hall of Presidents. Offline, I took
Lil's hand and walked to the Liberty Belle load-zone,
our spot for private conversations. Offline, I bummed a cigarette
from her.

Lil was upset—even through my bemused, offline haze,
I could tell that. Tears pricked her eyes.

“Why didn't you tell me?” she said, after a hard moment's staring into the
moonlight reflecting off the river.

Offline, I couldn't find stats or signals to help me
discuss the matter. Offline, I tried it without help. “I
don't think so. I don't think they've
got soul, I don't think they've got history,
I don't think they've got any kind of
connection to the past. The world grew up in the Disneys—they
visit this place for continuity as much as for entertainment. We
provide that.” I'm
offline, and they're not—what the hell
happened?

“It'll be okay, Lil. There's
nothing in that place that's better than us. Different
and new, but not better. You know that—you've
spent more time in the Mansion than anyone, you know how much
refinement, how much work there is in there. How can something they
whipped up in a couple weeks possibly be better that this thing
we've been maintaining for all these years?”

She ground the back of her sleeve against her eyes and smiled.
“Sorry,” she said. Her
nose was red, her eyes puffy, her freckles livid over the flush of
her cheeks. “Sorry—it's just
shocking. Maybe you're right. And even if you're
not—hey, that's the whole point of a
meritocracy, right? The best stuff survives, everything else gets
supplanted.

“Oh, shit, I hate how I look when I cry,” she said. “Let's go congratulate
them.”

As I took her hand, I was obscurely pleased with myself for
having improved her mood without artificial assistance.

Dan was nowhere to be seen as Lil and I mounted the stage at the
Hall, where Debra's ad-hocs and a knot of well-wishers
were celebrating by passing a rock around. Debra had lost the
tailcoat and hat, and was in an extreme state of relaxation, arms
around the shoulders of two of her cronies, pipe between her teeth.

She grinned around the pipe as Lil and I stumbled through some
insincere compliments, nodded, and toked heavily while Tim applied a
torch to the bowl.

“Thanks,” she said,
laconically. “It was a team effort.” She hugged her cronies to her, almost knocking their heads
together.

Lil said, “What's your timeline, then?”

Debra started unreeling a long spiel about critical paths,
milestones, requirements meetings, and I tuned her out. Ad-hocs were
crazy for that process stuff. I stared at my feet, at the
floorboards, and realized that they weren't floorboards
at all, but faux-finish painted over a copper mesh—a
Faraday cage. That's why the HERF gun hadn't
done anything; that's why they'd been so
casual about working with the shielding off their computers. With my
eye, I followed the copper shielding around the entire stage and up
the walls, where it disappeared into the ceiling. Once again, I was
struck by the evolvedness of Debra's ad-hocs, how their
trial by fire in China had armored them against the kind of
bush-league jiggery-pokery that the fuzzy bunnies in
Florida—myself included—came up with.

For instance, I didn't think there was a single
castmember in the Park outside of Deb's clique with the
stones to stage an assassination. Once I'd made that
leap, I realized that it was only a matter of time until they staged
another one—and another, and another. Whatever they
could get away with.

Debra's spiel finally wound down and Lil and I headed
away. I stopped in front of the backup terminal in the gateway
between Liberty Square and Fantasyland. “When was the
last time you backed up?” I asked
her. If they could go after me, they might go after any of us.

“Yesterday,” she
said. She exuded bone-weariness at me, looking more like an
overmediated guest than a tireless castmember.

“Let's run another backup, huh? We should
really back up at night and at lunchtime—with things the
way they are, we can't afford to lose an afternoon's
work, much less a week's.”

Lil rolled her eyes. I knew better than to argue with her when
she was tired, but this was too crucial to set aside for petulance.
“You can back up that often if you want to, Julius, but
don't tell me how to live my life, okay?”

“Come on, Lil—it only takes a minute, and
it'd make me feel a lot better. Please?” I hated the whine in my voice.

“No, Julius. No. Let's go home and get
some sleep. I want to do some work on new merch for the
Mansion—some collectible stuff, maybe.”

“For Christ's sake, is it really so much
to ask? Fine. Wait while I back up, then, all right?”

Lil groaned and glared at me.

I approached the terminal and cued a backup. Nothing happened.
Oh, yeah, right, I was offline. A cool sweat broke out all over my
new body.

Lil grabbed the couch as soon as we got in, mumbling something
about wanting to work on some revised merch ideas she'd
had. I glared at her as she subvocalized and air-typed in the
corner, shut away from me. I hadn't told her that I was
offline yet—it just seemed like insignificant personal
bitching relative to the crises she was coping with.

Besides, I'd been knocked offline before, though not
in fifty years, and often as not the system righted itself after a
good night's sleep. I could visit the doctor in the
morning if things were still screwy.

So I crawled into bed, and when my bladder woke me in the night,
I had to go into the kitchen to consult our old starburst clock to
get the time. It was 3 a.m., and when the hell had we expunged the
house of all timepieces, anyway?

Lil was sacked out on the couch, and complained feebly when I
tried to rouse her, so I covered her with a blanket and went back to
bed, alone.

I woke disoriented and crabby, without my customary morning jolt
of endorphin. Vivid dreams of death and destruction slipped away as
I sat up. I preferred to let my subconscious do its own thing, so
I'd long ago programmed my systems to keep me asleep
during REM cycles except in emergencies. The dream left a foul taste
in my mind as I staggered into the kitchen, where Lil was fixing
coffee.

“Why didn't you wake me up last night?
I'm one big ache from sleeping on the couch,” Lil said as I stumbled in.

She had the perky, jaunty quality of someone who could instruct
her nervous system to manufacture endorphin and adrenaline at will.
I felt like punching the wall.

“You wouldn't get up,” I said, and slopped coffee in the general direction of a mug,
then scalded my tongue with it.

“And why are you up so late? I was hoping you would
cover a shift for me—the merch ideas are really coming
together and I wanted to hit the Imagineering shop and try some
prototyping.”

“Can't.” I
foraged a slice of bread with cheese and noticed a crumby plate in
the sink. Dan had already eaten and gone, apparently.

“Really?” she said,
and my blood started to boil in earnest. I slammed Dan's
plate into the dishwasher and shoved bread into my maw.

“Yes. Really. It's your shift—fucking
work it or call in sick.”

Lil reeled. Normally, I was the soul of sweetness in the morning,
when I was hormonally enhanced, anyway. “What's
wrong, honey?” she said, going into
helpful castmember mode. Now I wanted to hit something besides the
wall.

“Just leave me alone, all right? Go fiddle with
fucking merch. I've got real work to do—in
case you haven't noticed, Debra's about to
eat you and your little band of plucky adventurers and pick her
teeth with the bones. For God's sake, Lil, don't
you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don't you
have any goddamned passion?”

Lil whitened and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. It was the
worst thing I could possibly have said.

Lil and I met three years before, at a barbecue that some friends
of her parents threw, a kind of castmember mixer. She'd
been just 19—apparent and real—and had a
bubbly, flirty vibe that made me dismiss her, at first, as just
another airhead castmember.

Her parents—Tom and Rita—on the other
hand, were fascinating people, members of the original ad-hoc that
had seized power in Walt Disney World, wresting control from a gang
of wealthy former shareholders who'd been operating it
as their private preserve. Rita was apparent 20 or so, but she
radiated a maturity and a fiery devotion to the Park that threw her
daughter's superficiality into sharp relief.

They throbbed with Whuffie, Whuffie beyond measure, beyond use.
In a world where even a zeroed-out Whuffie loser could eat, sleep,
travel and access the net without hassle, their wealth was more than
sufficient to repeatedly access the piffling few scarce things left
on earth over and over.

The conversation turned to the first day, when she and her pals
had used a cutting torch on the turnstiles and poured in, wearing
homemade costumes and name tags. They infiltrated the shops, the
control centers, the rides, first by the hundred, then, as the hot
July day ticked by, by the thousand. The shareholders'
lackeys—who worked the Park for the chance to be a part
of the magic, even if they had no control over the management
decisions—put up a token resistance. Before the day was
out, though, the majority had thrown in their lots with the raiders,
handing over security codes and pitching in.

“But we knew the shareholders wouldn't
give in as easy as that,” Lil's
mother said, sipping her lemonade. “We kept the Park
running 24/7 for the next two weeks, never giving the shareholders a
chance to fight back without doing it in front of the guests. We'd
prearranged with a couple of airline ad-hocs to add extra routes to
Orlando and the guests came pouring in.” She smiled, remembering the moment, and her features in
repose were Lil's almost identically. It was only when
she was talking that her face changed, muscles tugging it into an
expression decades older than the face that bore it.

“I spent most of the time running the merch stand at
Madame Leota's outside the Mansion, gladhanding the
guests while hissing nasties back and forth with the shareholders
who kept trying to shove me out. I slept in a sleeping bag on the
floor of the utilidor, with a couple dozen others, in three hour
shifts. That was when I met this asshole”—she
chucked her husband on the shoulder—“he'd
gotten the wrong sleeping bag by mistake and wouldn't
budge when I came down to crash. I just crawled in next to him and
the rest, as they say, is history.”

Lil rolled her eyes and made gagging noises. “Jesus,
Rita, no one needs to hear about that part of it.”

Tom patted her arm. “Lil, you're an
adult—if you can't stomach hearing about
your parents' courtship, you can either sit somewhere
else or grin and bear it. But you don't get to dictate
the topic of conversation.”

Lil gave us adults a very youthful glare and flounced off. Rita
shook her head at Lil's departing backside. “There's
not much fire in that generation,” she
said. “Not a lot of passion. It's our
fault—we thought that Disney World would be the best
place to raise a child in the Bitchun Society. Maybe it was,
but…” She
trailed off and rubbed her palms on her thighs, a gesture I'd
come to know in Lil, by and by. “I guess there aren't
enough challenges for them these days. They're too
cooperative.” She laughed and her
husband took her hand.

“We sound like our parents,” Tom said. “'When we were growing up,
we didn't have any of this newfangled life-extension
stuff—we took our chances with the cave bears and the
dinosaurs!'” Tom wore
himself older, apparent 50, with graying sidewalls and crinkled
smile-lines, the better to present a non-threatening air of
authority to the guests. It was a truism among the first-gen ad-hocs
that women castmembers should wear themselves young, men old.
“We're just a couple of Bitchun
fundamentalists, I guess.”

Lil called over from a nearby conversation: “Are they
telling you what a pack of milksops we are, Julius? When you get
tired of that, why don't you come over here and have a
smoke?” I noticed that she and her
cohort were passing a crack pipe.

“What's the use?” Lil's mother sighed.

“Oh, I don't know that it's as
bad as all that,” I said, virtually
my first words of the afternoon. I was painfully conscious that I
was only there by courtesy, just one of the legion of hopefuls who
flocked to Orlando every year, aspiring to a place among the ruling
cliques. “They're passionate about
maintaining the Park, that's for sure. I made the
mistake of lifting a queue-gate at the Jungleboat Cruise last week
and I got a very earnest lecture about the smooth functioning of the
Park from a castmember who couldn't have been more than
18. I think that they don't have the passion for
creating Bitchunry that we have—they don't
need it—but they've got plenty of drive to
maintain it.”

Lil's mother gave me a long, considering look that I
didn't know what to make of. I couldn't tell
if I had offended her or what.

“I mean, you can't be a revolutionary
after the revolution, can you? Didn't we all struggle so
that kids like Lil wouldn't have to?”

“Funny you should say that,” Tom said. He had the same considering look on his face.
“Just yesterday we were talking about the very same
thing. We were talking—” he
drew a breath and looked askance at his wife, who nodded—“about
deadheading. For a while, anyway. See if things changed much in
fifty or a hundred years.”

I felt a kind of shameful disappointment. Why was I wasting my
time schmoozing with these two, when they wouldn't be
around when the time came to vote me in? I banished the thought as
quickly as it came—I was talking to them because they
were nice people. Not every conversation had to be strategically
important.

“Really? Deadheading.” I
remember that I thought of Dan then, about his views on the
cowardice of deadheading, on the bravery of ending it when you found
yourself obsolete. He'd comforted me once, when my last
living relative, my uncle, opted to go to sleep for three thousand
years. My uncle had been born pre-Bitchun, and had never quite
gotten the hang of it. Still, he was my link to my family, to my
first adulthood and my only childhood. Dan had taken me to Gananoque
and we'd spent the day bounding around the countryside
on seven-league boots, sailing high over the lakes of the Thousand
Islands and the crazy fiery carpet of autumn leaves. We topped off
the day at a dairy commune he knew where they still made cheese from
cow's milk and there'd been a thousand
smells and bottles of strong cider and a girl whose name I'd
long since forgotten but whose exuberant laugh I'd
remember forever. And it wasn't so important, then, my
uncle going to sleep for three milliennia, because whatever
happened, there were the leaves and the lakes and the crisp sunset
the color of blood and the girl's laugh.

“Have you talked to Lil about it?”

Rita shook her head. “It's just a thought,
really. We don't want to worry her. She's
not good with hard decisions—it's her
generation.”

They changed the subject not long thereafter, and I sensed
discomfort, knew that they had told me too much, more than they'd
intended. I drifted off and found Lil and her young pals, and we
toked a little and cuddled a little.

Within a month, I was working at the Haunted Mansion, Tom and
Rita were invested in Canopic jars in Kissimee with instructions not
to be woken until their newsbots grabbed sufficient interesting
material to make it worth their while, and Lil and I were a hot
item.

Lil didn't deal well with her parents'
decision to deadhead. For her, it was a slap in the face, a reproach
to her and her generation of twittering Polyannic castmembers.

For God's sake, Lil, don't you ever get
fucking angry about anything? Don't you have any
goddamned passion?

The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was saying them,
and Lil, 15 percent of my age, young enough to be my
great-granddaughter; Lil, my lover and best friend and sponsor to
the Liberty Square ad-hocracy; Lil turned white as a sheet, turned
on her heel and walked out of the kitchen. She got in her runabout
and went to the Park to take her shift.

I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling fan as it made its
lazy turns, and felt like shit.

CHAPTER 5

When I finally returned to the Park, 36 hours had passed and Lil
had not come back to the house. If she'd tried to call,
she would've gotten my voicemail—I had no
way of answering my phone. As it turned out, she hadn't
been trying to reach me at all.

I'd spent the time alternately moping, drinking, and
plotting terrible, irrational vengeance on Debra for killing me,
destroying my relationship, taking away my beloved (in hindsight,
anyway) Hall of Presidents and threatening the Mansion. Even in my
addled state, I knew that this was pretty unproductive, and I kept
promising that I would cut it out, take a shower and some sober-ups,
and get to work at the Mansion.

I was working up the energy to do just that when Dan came in.

“Jesus,” he said,
shocked. I guess I was a bit of a mess, sprawled on the sofa in my
underwear, all gamy and baggy and bloodshot.

“Hey, Dan. How's it goin'?”

He gave me one of his patented wry looks and I felt the same
weird reversal of roles that we'd undergone at the U of
T, when he had become the native, and I had become the interloper.
He was the together one with the wry looks and I was the pathetic
seeker who'd burned all his reputation capital. Out of
habit, I checked my Whuffie, and a moment later I stopped being
startled by its low score and was instead shocked by the fact that I
could check it at all. I was back online!

“Now, what do you know about that?” I said, staring at my dismal Whuffie.

“What?” he said.

I called his cochlea. “My systems are back online,” I subvocalized.

He started. “You were offline?”

I jumped up from the couch and did a little happy underwear
dance. “I was, but I'm not now.” I felt better than I had in days, ready to beat the
world—or at least Debra.

“Let me take a shower, then let's get to
the Imagineering labs. I've got a pretty kickass
idea.”

The idea, as I explained it in the runabout, was a preemptive
rehab of the Mansion. Sabotaging the Hall had been a nasty, stupid
idea, and I'd gotten what I deserved for it. The whole
point of the Bitchun Society was to be more reputable than the next
ad-hoc, to succeed on merit, not trickery, despite assassinations
and the like.

So a rehab it would be.

“Back in the early days of the Disneyland Mansion, in
California,” I explained, “Walt
had a guy in a suit of armor just past the first Doom Buggy curve,
he'd leap out and scare the hell out of the guests as
they went by. It didn't last long, of course. The poor
bastard kept getting punched out by startled guests, and besides,
the armor wasn't too comfortable for long shifts.”

Dan chuckled appreciatively. The Bitchun Society had all but done
away with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what
remained—tending bar, mopping toilets—commanded
Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure in your off-hours.

“But that guy in the suit of armor, he could
improvise. You'd get a slightly different show
every time. It's like the castmembers who spiel on the
Jungleboat Cruise. They've each got their own patter,
their own jokes, and even though the animatronics aren't
so hot, it makes the show worth seeing.”

“You're going to fill the Mansion with
castmembers in armor?” Dan asked,
shaking his head.

I waved away his objections, causing the runabout to swerve,
terrifying a pack of guests who were taking a ride on rented bikes
around the property. “No,” I
said, flapping a hand apologetically at the white-faced guests.
“Not at all. But what if all of the animatronics had
human operators—telecontrollers, working with waldoes?
We'll let them interact with the guests, talk with them,
scare them… We'll get rid of the
existing animatronics, replace 'em with full-mobility
robots, then cast the parts over the Net. Think of the Whuffie! You
could put, say, a thousand operators online at once, ten shifts per
day, each of them caught up in our Mansion…
We'll give out awards for outstanding performances, the
shifts'll be based on popular vote. In effect, we'll
be adding another ten thousand guests to the Mansion's
throughput every day, only these guests will be honorary
castmembers.”

“That's pretty good,” Dan said. “Very Bitchun. Debra may have AI and
flash-baking, but you'll have human interaction,
courtesy of the biggest Mansion-fans in the world—”

“And those are the very fans Debra'll have
to win over to make a play for the Mansion. Very elegant, huh?”

The first order of business was to call Lil, patch things up, and
pitch the idea to her. The only problem was, my cochlea was offline
again. My mood started to sour, and I had Dan call her instead.

We met her up at Imagineering, a massive complex of prefab
aluminum buildings painted Go-Away Green that had thronged with mad
inventors since the Bitchun Society had come to Walt Disney World.
The ad-hocs who had built an Imagineering department in Florida and
now ran the thing were the least political in the Park, classic
labcoat-and-clipboard types who would work for anyone so long as the
ideas were cool. Not caring about Whuffie meant that they
accumulated it in plenty on both the left and right hands.

Lil was working with Suneep, AKA the Merch Miracle. He could
design, prototype and produce a souvenir faster than
anyone—shirts, sculptures, pens, toys, housewares, he
was the king. They were collaborating on their HUDs, facing each
other across a lab-bench in the middle of a lab as big as a
basketball court, cluttered with logomarked tchotchkes and gabbling
away while their eyes danced over invisible screens.

Dan reflexively joined the collaborative space as he entered the
lab, leaving me the only one out on the joke. Dan was clearly
delighted by what he saw.

I nudged him with an elbow. “Make a hardcopy,” I hissed.

Instead of pitying me, he just airtyped a few commands and pages
started to roll out of a printer in the lab's corner.
Anyone else would have made a big deal out of it, but he just
brought me into the discussion.

If I needed proof that Lil and I were meant for each other, the
designs she and Suneep had come up with were more than enough.
She'd been thinking just the way I had—souvenirs
that stressed the human scale of the Mansion. There were miniature
animatronics of the Hitchhiking Ghosts in a black-light box, their
skeletal robotics visible through their layers of plastic clothing;
action figures that communicated by IR, so that placing one in
proximity with another would unlock its Mansion-inspired
behaviors—the raven cawed, Mme. Leota's head
incanted, the singing busts sang. She'd worked up some
formal attire based on the castmember costume, cut in this year's
stylish lines.

It was good merch, is what I'm trying to say. In my
mind's eye, I was seeing the relaunch of the Mansion in
six months, filled with robotic avatars of Mansion-nuts the world
'round, Mme. Leota's gift cart piled high
with brilliant swag, strolling human players ad-libbing with the
guests in the queue area…

Lil looked up from her mediated state and glared at me as I pored
over the hardcopy, nodding enthusiastically.

“Passionate enough for you?” she snapped.

I felt a flush creeping into face, my ears. It was somewhere
between anger and shame, and I reminded myself that I was more than
a century older than her, and it was my responsibility to be mature.
Also, I'd started the fight.

“This is fucking fantastic, Lil,” I said. Her look didn't soften. “Really
choice stuff. I had a great idea—” I ran it down for her, the avatars, the robots, the rehab.
She stopped glaring, started taking notes, smiling, showing me her
dimples, her slanted eyes crinkling at the corners.

“I know that,” I
said. The flush burned hotter. “But that's
the point—what Debra does isn't easy either.
It's risky, dangerous. It made her and her ad-hoc
better—it made them sharper.” Sharper than us, that's for sure.
“They can make decisions like this fast, and execute them
just as quickly. We need to be able to do that, too.”

Was I really advocating being more like Debra? The words'd
just popped out, but I saw that I'd been right—we'd
have to beat Debra at her own game, out-evolve her ad-hocs.

“I understand what you're saying,” Lil said. I could tell she was upset—she'd
reverted to castmemberspeak. “It's a very
good idea. I think that we stand a good chance of making it happen
if we approach the group and put it to them, after doing the
research, building the plans, laying out the critical path, and
privately soliciting feedback from some of them.”

I felt like I was swimming in molasses. At the rate that the
Liberty Square ad-hoc moved, we'd be holding formal
requirements reviews while Debra's people tore down the
Mansion around us. So I tried a different tactic.

“Suneep, you've been involved in some
rehabs, right?”

Suneep nodded slowly, with a cautious expression, a nonpolitical
animal being drawn into a political discussion.

“Okay, so tell me, if we came to you with this plan
and asked you to pull together a production schedule—one
that didn't have any review, just take the idea and run
with it—and then pull it off, how long would it take you
to execute it?”

Lil smiled primly. She'd dealt with Imagineering
before.

“About five years,” he
said, almost instantly.

“Five years?” I
squawked. “Why five years? Debra's people
overhauled the Hall in a month!”

“Oh, wait,” he said.
“No review at all?”

“No review. Just come up with the best way you can to
do this, and do it. And we can provide you with unlimited, skilled
labor, three shifts around the clock.”

He rolled his eyes back and ticked off days on his fingers while
muttering under his breath. He was a tall, thin man with a shock of
curly dark hair that he smoothed unconsciously with surprisingly
stubby fingers while he thought.

“About eight weeks,” he
said. “Barring accidents, assuming off-the-shelf parts,
unlimited labor, capable management, material availability…” He trailed off again, and his short fingers waggled as he
pulled up a HUD and started making a list.

“Wait,” Lil said,
alarmed. “How do you get from five years to eight
weeks?”

Now it was my turn to smirk. I'd seen how
Imagineering worked when they were on their own, building prototypes
and conceptual mockups—I knew that the real bottleneck
was the constant review and revisions, the ever-fluctuating
groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissioned their work.

Suneep looked sheepish. “Well, if all I have to do is
satisfy myself that my plans are good and my buildings won't
fall down, I can make it happen very fast. Of course, my plans
aren't perfect. Sometimes, I'll be halfway
through a project when someone suggests a new flourish or approach
that makes the whole thing immeasurably better. Then it's
back to the drawing board… So I stay at the
drawing board for a long time at the start, get feedback from other
Imagineers, from the ad-hocs, from focus groups and the Net. Then we
do reviews at every stage of construction, check to see if anyone
has had a great idea we haven't thought of and
incorporate it, sometimes rolling back the work.

“It's slow, but it works.”

Lil was flustered. “But if you can do a complete
revision in eight weeks, why not just finish it, then plan another
revision, do that one in eight weeks, and so on? Why take
five years before anyone can ride the thing?”

“Because that's how it's
done,” I said to Lil. “But
that's not how it has to be done. That's
how we'll save the Mansion.”

I felt the surety inside of me, the certain knowledge that I was
right. Ad-hocracy was a great thing, a Bitchun thing, but the
organization needed to turn on a dime—that would be even
more Bitchun.

“Lil,” I said,
looking into her eyes, trying to burn my POV into her. “We
have to do this. It's our only chance. We'll
recruit hundreds to come to Florida and work on the rehab. We'll
give every Mansion nut on the planet a shot at joining up, then
we'll recruit them again to work at it, to run the
telepresence rigs. We'll get buy-in from the biggest
super-recommenders in the world, and we'll build
something better and faster than any ad-hoc ever has, without
abandoning the original Imagineers' vision. It will be
unspeakably Bitchun.”

Lil dropped her eyes and it was her turn to flush. She paced the
floor, hands swinging at her sides. I could tell that she was still
angry with me, but excited and scared and yes, passionate.

“It's not up to me, you know,” she said at length, still pacing. Dan and I exchanged wicked
grins. She was in.

“I know,” I said. But
it was, almost—she was a real opinion-leader in the
Liberty Square ad-hoc, someone who knew the systems back and forth,
someone who made good, reasonable decisions and kept her head in a
crisis. Not a hothead. Not prone to taking radical switchbacks. This
plan would burn up that reputation and the Whuffie that accompanied
it, in short order, but by the time that happened, she'd
have plenty of Whuffie with the new, thousands-strong ad-hoc.

“I mean, I can't guarantee anything. I'd
like to study the plans that Imagineering comes through with, do
some walk-throughs—”

I started to object, to remind her that speed was of the essence,
but she beat me to it.

“But I won't. We have to move fast. I'm
in.”

She didn't come into my arms, didn't kiss
me and tell me everything was forgiven, but she bought in, and that
was enough.

My systems came back online sometime that day, and I hardly
noticed, I was so preoccupied with the new Mansion. Holy shit, was
it ever audacious: since the first Mansion opened in California in
1969, no one had ever had the guts to seriously fuxor with it. Oh,
sure, the Paris version, Phantom Manor, had a slightly different
storyline, but it was just a minor bit of tweakage to satisfy the
European market at the time. No one wanted to screw up the legend.

What the hell made the Mansion so cool, anyway? I'd
been to Disney World any number of times as a guest before I settled
in, and truth be told, it had never been my absolute favorite.

But when I returned to Disney World, live and in person, freshly
bored stupid by the three-hour liveheaded flight from Toronto, I'd
found myself crowd-driven to it.

I'm a terrible, terrible person to visit theme-parks
with. Since I was a punk kid snaking my way through crowded subway
platforms, eeling into the only seat on a packed car, I'd
been obsessed with Beating The Crowd.

In the early days of the Bitchun Society, I'd known a
blackjack player, a compulsive counter of cards, an idiot savant of
odds. He was a pudgy, unassuming engineer, the moderately successful
founder of a moderately successful high-tech startup that had done
something arcane with software agents. While he was only moderately
successful, he was fabulously wealthy: he'd never raised
a cent of financing for his company, and had owned it outright when
he finally sold it for a bathtub full of money. His secret was the
green felt tables of Vegas, where he'd pilgrim off to
every time his bank balance dropped, there to count the monkey-cards
and calculate the odds and Beat The House.

Long after his software company was sold, long after he'd
made his nut, he was dressing up in silly disguises and hitting the
tables, grinding out hand after hand of twenty-one, for the sheer
satisfaction of Beating The House. For him, it was pure
brain-reward, a jolt of happy-juice every time the dealer busted and
every time he doubled down on a deckfull of face cards.

Though I'd never bought so much as a lottery ticket,
I immediately got his compulsion: for me, it was Beating The Crowd,
finding the path of least resistance, filling the gaps, guessing the
short queue, dodging the traffic, changing lanes with a whisper to
spare—moving with precision and grace and, above all,
expedience.

On that fateful return, I checked into the Fort Wilderness
Campground, pitched my tent, and fairly ran to the ferry docks to
catch a barge over to the Main Gate.

Crowds were light until I got right up to Main Gate and the
ticketing queues. Suppressing an initial instinct to dash for the
farthest one, beating my ferrymates to what rule-of-thumb said would
have the shortest wait, I stepped back and did a quick visual survey
of the twenty kiosks and evaluated the queued-up huddle in front of
each. Pre-Bitchun, I'd have been primarily interested in
their ages, but that is less and less a measure of anything other
than outlook, so instead I carefully examined their queuing styles,
their dress, and more than anything, their burdens.

You can tell more about someone's ability to
efficiently negotiate the complexities of a queue through what they
carry than through any other means—if only more people
realized it. The classic, of course, is the unladen citizen, a
person naked of even a modest shoulderbag or marsupial pocket. To
the layperson, such a specimen might be thought of as a sure bet for
a fast transaction, but I'd done an informal study and
come to the conclusion that these brave iconoclasts are often the
flightiest of the lot, left smiling with bovine mystification,
patting down their pockets in a fruitless search for a writing
implement, a piece of ID, a keycard, a rabbit's foot, a
rosary, a tuna sandwich.

No, for my money, I'll take what I call the Road
Worrier anytime. Such a person is apt to be carefully slung with
four or five carriers of one description or another, from bulging
cargo pockets to clever military-grade strap-on pouches with
biometrically keyed closures. The thing to watch for is the
ergonomic consideration given to these conveyances: do they balance,
are they slung for minimum interference and maximum ease of access?
Someone who's given that much consideration to their
gear is likely spending their time in line determining which bits
and pieces they'll need when they reach its headwaters
and is holding them at ready for fastest-possible processing.

This is a tricky call, since there are lookalike pretenders,
gear-pigs who pack everything because they lack the
organizational smarts to figure out what they should
pack—they're just as apt to be burdened with
bags and pockets and pouches, but the telltale is the efficiency of
that slinging. These pack mules will sag beneath their loads,
juggling this and that while pushing overloose straps up on their
shoulders.

I spied a queue that was made up of a group of Road Worriers, a
queue that was slightly longer than the others, but I joined it and
ticced nervously as I watched my progress relative to the other
spots I could've chosen. I was borne out, a positive
omen for a wait-free World, and I was sauntering down Main Street,
USA long before my ferrymates.

Returning to Walt Disney World was a homecoming for me. My
parents had brought me the first time when I was all of ten, just as
the first inklings of the Bitchun society were trickling into
everyone's consciousness: the death of scarcity, the
death of death, the struggle to rejig an economy that had grown up
focused on nothing but scarcity and death. My memories of the trip
are dim but warm, the balmy Florida climate and a sea of smiling
faces punctuated by magical, darkened moments riding in OmniMover
cars, past diorama after diorama.

I went again when I graduated high school and was amazed by the
richness of detail, the grandiosity and grandeur of it all. I spent
a week there stunned bovine, grinning and wandering from corner to
corner. Someday, I knew, I'd come to live there.

The Park became a touchstone for me, a constant in a world where
everything changed. Again and again, I came back to the Park,
grounding myself, communing with all the people I'd
been.

That day I bopped from land to land, ride to ride, seeking out
the short lines, the eye of the hurricane that crowded the Park to
capacity. I'd take high ground, standing on a bench or
hopping up on a fence, and do a visual reccy of all the queues in
sight, try to spot prevailing currents in the flow of the crowd,
generally having a high old obsessive time. Truth be told, I
probably spent as much time looking for walk-ins as I would've
spent lining up like a good little sheep, but I had more fun and got
more exercise.

The Haunted Mansion was experiencing a major empty spell: the
Snow Crash Spectacular parade had just swept through Liberty Square
en route to Fantasyland, dragging hordes of guests along with it,
dancing to the JapRap sounds of the comical Sushi-K and aping the
movements of the brave Hiro Protagonist. When they blew out, Liberty
Square was a ghost town, and I grabbed the opportunity to ride the
Mansion five times in a row, walking on every time.

The way I tell it to Lil, I noticed her and then I noticed the
Mansion, but to tell the truth it was the other way around.

The first couple rides through, I was just glad of the aggressive
air conditioning and the delicious sensation of sweat drying on my
skin. But on the third pass, I started to notice just how goddamn
cool the thing was. There wasn't a single bit of tech
more advanced than a film-loop projector in the whole place, but it
was all so cunningly contrived that the illusion of a haunted house
was perfect: the ghosts that whirled through the ballroom were
ghosts, three-dimensional and ethereal and phantasmic. The
ghosts that sang in comical tableaux through the graveyard were
equally convincing, genuinely witty and simultaneously creepy.

My fourth pass through, I noticed the detail, the
hostile eyes worked into the wallpaper's pattern, the
motif repeated in the molding, the chandeliers, the photo gallery. I
began to pick out the words to “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” the song that is repeated throughout the ride, whether in
sinister organ-tones repeating the main theme troppo troppo or the
spritely singing of the four musical busts in the graveyard.

It's a catchy tune, one that I hummed on my fifth
pass through, this time noticing that the overaggressive AC was,
actually, mysterious chills that blew through the rooms as wandering
spirits made their presence felt. By the time I debarked for the
fifth time, I was whistling the tune with jazzy improvisations in a
mixed-up tempo.

That's when Lil and I ran into each other. She was
picking up a discarded ice-cream wrapper—I'd
seen a dozen castmembers picking up trash that day, seen it so
frequently that I'd started doing it myself. She grinned
slyly at me as I debarked into the fried-food-and-disinfectant
perfume of the Park, hands in pockets, thoroughly pleased with
myself for having so completely experienced a really fine
hunk of art.

I smiled back at her, because it was only natural that one of the
Whuffie-kings who were privileged to tend this bit of heavenly
entertainment should notice how thoroughly I was enjoying her work.

“That's really, really Bitchun,” I said to her, admiring the titanic mountains of Whuffie my
HUD attributed to her.

She was in character, and not supposed to be cheerful, but
castmembers of her generation can't help but be
friendly. She compromised between ghastly demeanor and her natural
sweet spirit, and leered a grin at me, thumped through a zombie's
curtsey, and moaned “Thank you—we do
try to keep it spirited.”

I groaned appreciatively, and started to notice just how very
cute she was, this little button of a girl with her rotting maid's
uniform and her feather-shedding duster. She was just so clean and
scrubbed and happy about everything, she radiated it and made me
want to pinch her cheeks—either set.

The moment was on me, and so I said, “When do they let
you ghouls off? I'd love to take you out for a Zombie or
a Bloody Mary.”

Which led to more horrifying banter, and to my taking her out for
a couple at the Adventurer's Club, learning her age in
the process and losing my nerve, telling myself that there was
nothing we could possibly have to say to each other across a
century-wide gap.

While I tell Lil that I noticed her first and the Mansion second,
the reverse is indeed true. But it's also true—and
I never told her this—that the thing I love best about
the Mansion is:

It's where I met her.

Dan and I spent the day riding the Mansion, drafting scripts for
the telepresence players who we hoped to bring on-board. We were in
a totally creative zone, the dialog running as fast as he could
transcribe it. Jamming on ideas with Dan was just about as terrific
as a pass-time could be.

I was all for leaking the plan to the Net right away, getting
hearts-and-minds action with our core audience, but Lil turned it
down.

She was going to spend the next couple days quietly politicking
among the rest of the ad-hoc, getting some support for the idea, and
she didn't want the appearance of impropriety that would
come from having outsiders being brought in before the ad-hoc.

Talking to the ad-hocs, bringing them around—it was a
skill I'd never really mastered. Dan was good at it, Lil
was good at it, but me, I think that I was too self-centered to ever
develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed
that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no
patience for explaining things in short words for mouth-breathers
who just didn't get it.

The truth of the matter is, I'm a bright enough guy,
but I'm hardly a genius. Especially when it comes to
people. Probably comes from Beating The Crowd, never seeing
individuals, just the mass—the enemy of expedience.

I never would have made it into the Liberty Square ad-hoc on my
own. Lil made it happen for me, long before we started sleeping
together. I'd assumed that her folks would be my best
allies in the process of joining up, but they were too jaded, too
ready to take the long sleep to pay much attention to a newcomer
like me.

Lil took me under her wing, inviting me to after-work parties,
talking me up to her cronies, quietly passing around copies of my
thesis-work. And she did the same in reverse, sincerely extolling
the virtues of the others I met, so that I knew what there was to
respect about them and couldn't help but treat them as
individuals.

In the years since, I'd lost that respect. Mostly, I
palled around with Lil, and once he arrived, Dan, and with
net-friends around the world. The ad-hocs that I worked with all day
treated me with basic courtesy but not much friendliness.

I guess I treated them the same. When I pictured them in my mind,
they were a faceless, passive-aggressive mass, too caught up in the
starchy world of consensus-building to ever do much of anything.

Dan and I threw ourselves into it headlong, trolling the Net for
address lists of Mansion-otakus from the four corners of the globe,
spreadsheeting them against their timezones, temperaments, and, of
course, their Whuffie.

“That's weird,” I said, looking up from the old-fashioned terminal I was
using—my systems were back offline. They'd
been sputtering up and down for a couple days now, and I kept
meaning to go to the doctor, but I'd never gotten
'round to it. Periodically, I'd get a jolt
of urgency when I remembered that this meant my backup was
stale-dating, but the Mansion always took precedence.

“Huh?” he said.

I tapped the display. “See these?” It was a fan-site, displaying a collection of animated 3-D
meshes of various elements of the Mansion, part of a giant
collaborative project that had been ongoing for decades, to build an
accurate 3-D walkthrough of every inch of the Park. I'd
used those meshes to build my own testing fly-throughs.

“Those are terrific,” Dan
said. “That guy must be a total fiend.” The meshes' author had painstakingly modeled,
chained and animated every ghost in the ballroom scene, complete
with the kinematics necessary for full motion. Where a “normal” fan-artist might've used a standard human
kinematics library for the figures, this one had actually written
his own from the ground up, so that the ghosts moved with a spectral
fluidity that was utterly unhuman.

“Who's the author?” Dan asked. “Do we have him on our list yet?”

I scrolled down to display the credits. “I'll
be damned,” Dan breathed.

The author was Tim, Debra's elfin crony. He'd
submitted the designs a week before my assassination.

“What do you think it means?” I asked Dan, though I had a couple ideas on the subject
myself.

“Tim's a Mansion nut,” Dan said. “I knew that.”

“You knew?”

He looked a little defensive. “Sure. I told you, back
when you had me hanging out with Debra's gang.”

Had I asked him to hang out with Debra? As I remembered it, it
had been his suggestion. Too much to think about.

“But what does it mean, Dan? Is he an ally? Should we
try to recruit him? Or is he the one that'd convinced
Debra she needs to take over the Mansion?”

Dan shook his head. “I'm not even sure
that she wants to take over the Mansion. I know Debra, all she wants
to do is turn ideas into things, as fast and as copiously as
possible. She picks her projects carefully. She's
acquisitive, sure, but she's cautious. She had a great
idea for Presidents, and so she took over. I never heard her talk
about the Mansion.”

“Of course you didn't. She's
cagey. Did you hear her talk about the Hall of Presidents?”

Dan fumbled. “Not really… I mean, not in so many words, but—”

“But nothing,” I
said. “She's after the Mansion, she's
after the Magic Kingdom, she's after the Park. She's
taking over, goddamn it, and I'm the only one who seems
to have noticed.”

I came clean to Lil about my systems that night, as we were
fighting. Fighting had become our regular evening pastime, and Dan
had taken to sleeping at one of the hotels on-site rather than
endure it.

I'd started it, of course. “We're
going to get killed if we don't get off our asses and
start the rehab,” I said, slamming
myself down on the sofa and kicking at the scratched coffee table. I
heard the hysteria and unreason in my voice and it just made me
madder. I was frustrated by not being able to check in on Suneep and
Dan, and, as usual, it was too late at night to call anyone and do
anything about it. By the morning, I'd have forgotten
again.

From the kitchen, Lil barked back, “I'm
doing what I can, Jules. If you've got a better way,
I'd love to hear about it.”

“Oh, bullshit. I'm doing what I can,
planning the thing out. I'm ready to go. It was
your job to get the ad-hocs ready for it, but you keep telling me
they're not. When will they be?”

“Jesus, you're a nag.”

“I wouldn't nag if you'd only
fucking make it happen. What are you doing all day, anyway? Working
shifts at the Mansion? Rearranging deck chairs on the Great Titanic
Adventure?”

“I'm working my fucking ass off.
I've spoken to every goddamn one of them at least twice
this week about it.”

“Sure,” I hollered at
the kitchen. “Sure you have.”

“Don't take my word for it, then. Check my
fucking phone logs.”

She waited.

“Well? Check them!”

“I'll check them later,” I said, dreading where this was going.

“Oh, no you don't,” she said, stalking into the room, fuming. “You
can't call me a liar and then refuse to look at the
evidence.” She planted her hands on
her slim little hips and glared at me. She'd gone pale
and I could count every freckle on her face, her throat, her
collarbones, the swell of her cleavage in the old vee-neck shirt
I'd given her on a day-trip to Nassau.

“Well?” she asked.
She looked ready to wring my neck.

“I can't,” I
admitted, not meeting her eyes.

“Yes you can—here, I'll dump
it to your public directory.”

Her expression shifted to one of puzzlement when she failed to
locate me on her network. “What's going
on?”

So I told her. Offline, outcast, malfunctioning.

“Well, why haven't you gone to the doctor?
I mean, it's been weeks. I'll call
him right now.”

“Forget it,” I said.
“I'll see him tomorrow. No sense in getting
him out of bed.”

But I didn't see him the day after, or the day after
that. Too much to do, and the only times I remembered to call
someone, I was too far from a public terminal or it was too late or
too early. My systems came online a couple times, and I was too busy
with the plans for the Mansion. Lil grew accustomed to the drifts of
hard copy that littered the house, to printing out her annotations
to my designs and leaving them on my favorite chair—to
living like the cavemen of the information age had, surrounded by
dead trees and ticking clocks.

Being offline helped me focus. Focus is hardly the word for
it—I obsessed. I sat in front of the terminal I'd
brought home all day, every day, crunching plans, dictating
voicemail. People who wanted to reach me had to haul ass out to the
house, and speak to me.

I grew too obsessed to fight, and Dan moved back, and then it was
my turn to take hotel rooms so that the rattle of my keyboard
wouldn't keep him up nights. He and Lil were working a
full-time campaign to recruit the ad-hoc to our cause, and I started
to feel like we were finally in harmony, about to reach our goal.

I went home one afternoon clutching a sheaf of hardcopy and burst
into the living room, gabbling a mile-a-minute about a wrinkle on my
original plan that would add a third walk-through segment to the
ride, increasing the number of telepresence rigs we could use
without decreasing throughput.

I was mid-babble when my systems came back online. The public
chatter in the room sprang up on my HUD.

And then I'm going to tear off every stitch of
clothing and jump you.

And then what?

I'm going to bang you till you limp.

Jesus, Lil, you are one rangy cowgirl.

My eyes closed, shutting out everything except for the glowing
letters. Quickly, they vanished. I opened my eyes again, looking at
Lil, who was flushed and distracted. Dan looked scared.

Lil had, by that time, figured out that I was back online, that
their secret messaging had been discovered.

“Having fun, Lil?” I
asked.

Lil shook her head and glared at me. “Just go, Julius.
I'll send your stuff to the hotel.”

“You want me to go, huh? So you can bang him till he
limps?”

“This is my house, Julius. I'm asking you
to get out of it. I'll see you at work
tomorrow—we're having a general ad-hoc
meeting to vote on the rehab.”

It was her house.

“Lil, Julius—” Dan began.

“This is between me and him,” Lil said. “Stay out of it.”

I dropped my papers—I wanted to throw them, but I
dropped them, flump, and I turned on my heel and walked
out, not bothering to close the door behind me.

Dan showed up at the hotel ten minutes after I did and rapped on
my door. I was all-over numb as I opened the door. He had a bottle
of tequila—my tequila, brought over from the
house that I'd shared with Lil.

He sat down on the bed and stared at the logo-marked wallpaper. I
took the bottle from him, got a couple glasses from the bathroom and
poured.

“It's my fault,” he said.

“I'm sure it is,” I said.

“We got to drinking a couple nights ago. She was
really upset. Hadn't seen you in days, and when she did
see you, you freaked her out. Snapping at her. Arguing. Insulting
her.”

“So you made her,” I
said.

He shook his head, then nodded, took a drink. “I did.
It's been a long time since I…”

“You had sex with my girlfriend, in my house, while I
was away, working.”

“Jules, I'm sorry. I did it, and I kept on
doing it. I'm not much of a friend to either of you.

“She's pretty broken up. She wanted me to
come out here and tell you it was all a mistake, that you were just
being paranoid.”

We sat in silence for a long time. I refilled his glass, then my
own.

“I couldn't do that,” he said. “I'm worried about you. You
haven't been right, not for months. I don't
know what it is, but you should get to a doctor.”

“I don't need a doctor,” I snapped. The liquor had melted the numbness and left
burning anger and bile, my constant companions. “I need a
friend who doesn't fuck my girlfriend when my back is
turned.”

I threw my glass at the wall. It bounced off, leaving
tequila-stains on the wallpaper, and rolled under the bed. Dan
started, but stayed seated. If he'd stood up, I
would've hit him. Dan's good at crises.

“If it's any consolation, I expect to be
dead pretty soon,” he said. He gave
me a wry grin. “My Whuffie's doing good. This
rehab should take it up over the top. I'll be ready to
go.”

That stopped me. I'd somehow managed to forget that
Dan, my good friend Dan, was going to kill himself.

“You're going to do it,” I said, sitting down next to him. It hurt to think about it.
I really liked the bastard. He might've been my best
friend.

There was a knock at the door. I opened it without checking the
peephole. It was Lil.

She looked younger than ever. Young and small and miserable. A
snide remark died in my throat. I wanted to hold her.

She brushed past me and went to Dan, who squirmed out of her
embrace.

“No,” he said, and
stood up and sat on the windowsill, staring down at the Seven Seas
Lagoon.

“Dan's just been explaining to me that he
plans on being dead in a couple months,” I
said. “Puts a damper on the long-term plans, doesn't
it, Lil?”

Tears streamed down her face and she seemed to fold in on
herself. “I'll take what I can get,” she said.

I choked on a knob of misery, and I realized that it was Dan, not
Lil, whose loss upset me the most.

Lil took Dan's hand and led him out of the room.

I guess I'll take what I can get, too, I
thought.

CHAPTER 6

Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the
ceiling fan, I pondered the possibility that I was nuts.

It wasn't unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun
Society, and even though there were cures, they weren't
pleasant.

I was once married to a crazy person. We were both about 70, and
I was living for nothing but joy. Her name was Zoya, and I called
her Zed.

We met in orbit, where I'd gone to experience the
famed low-gravity sybarites. Getting staggering drunk is not much
fun at one gee, but at ten to the neg eight, it's a
blast. You don't stagger, you bounce, and when
you're bouncing in a sphere full of other bouncing,
happy, boisterous naked people, things get deeply fun.

I was bouncing around inside a clear sphere that was a mile in
diameter, filled with smaller spheres in which one could procure
bulbs of fruity, deadly concoctions. Musical instruments littered
the sphere's floor, and if you knew how to play, you'd
snag one, tether it to you and start playing. Others would pick up
their own axes and jam along. The tunes varied from terrific to
awful, but they were always energetic.

I had been working on my third symphony on and off, and whenever
I thought I had a nice bit nailed, I'd spend some time
in the sphere playing it. Sometimes, the strangers who jammed in
gave me new and interesting lines of inquiry, and that was good.
Even when they didn't, playing an instrument was a fast
track to intriguing an interesting, naked stranger.

Which is how we met. She snagged a piano and pounded out
barrelhouse runs in quirky time as I carried the main thread of the
movement on a cello. At first it was irritating, but after a short
while I came to a dawning comprehension of what she was doing to my
music, and it was really good. I'm a sucker for
musicians.

We brought the session to a crashing stop, me bowing furiously as
spheres of perspiration beaded on my body and floated gracefully
into the hydrotropic recyclers, she beating on the 88 like they were
the perp who killed her partner.

I collapsed dramatically as the last note crashed through the
bubble. The singles, couples and groups stopped in midflight coitus
to applaud. She took a bow, untethered herself from the Steinway,
and headed for the hatch.

I coiled my legs up and did a fast burn through the sphere,
desperate to reach the hatch before she did. I caught her as she was
leaving.

“Hey!” I said.
“That was great! I'm Julius! How're
you doing?”

She reached out with both hands and squeezed my nose and my unit
simultaneously—not hard, you understand, but playfully.
“Honk!” she said, and
squirmed through the hatch while I gaped at my burgeoning chub-on.

I chased after her. “Wait,” I called as she tumbled through the spoke of the station
towards the gravity.

She had a pianist's body—re-engineered
arms and hands that stretched for impossible lengths, and she used
them with a spacehand's grace, vaulting herself forward
at speed. I bumbled after her best as I could on my freshman
spacelegs, but by the time I reached the half-gee rim of the
station, she was gone.

I didn't find her again until the next movement was
done and I went to the bubble to try it out on an oboe. I was just
getting warmed up when she passed through the hatch and tied off to
the piano.

This time, I clamped the oboe under my arm and bopped over to her
before moistening the reed and blowing. I hovered over the piano's
top, looking her in the eye as we jammed. Her mood that day was 4/4
time and I-IV-V progressions, in a feel that swung around from blues
to rock to folk, teasing at the edge of my own melodies. She noodled
at me, I noodled back at her, and her eyes crinkled charmingly
whenever I managed a smidge of tuneful wit.

She was almost completely flatchested, and covered in a fine, red
downy fur, like a chipmunk. It was a jaunter's style,
suited to the climate-controlled, soft-edged life in space. Fifty
years later, I was dating Lil, another redhead, but Zed was my
first.

I played and played, entranced by the fluidity of her movements
at the keyboard, her comical moues of concentration when picking out
a particularly kicky little riff. When I got tired, I took it to a
slow bridge or gave her a solo. I was going to make this last as
long as I could. Meanwhile, I maneuvered my way between her and the
hatch.

When I blew the last note, I was wrung out as a washcloth, but I
summoned the energy to zip over to the hatch and block it. She
calmly untied and floated over to me.

I looked in her eyes, silvered slanted cat-eyes, eyes that I'd
been staring into all afternoon, and watched the smile that started
at their corners and spread right down to her long, elegant toes.
She looked back at me, then, at length, grabbed ahold of my joint
again.

“You'll do,” she
said, and led me to her sleeping quarters, across the station.

We didn't sleep.

Zoya had been an early network engineer for the geosynch
broadband constellations that went up at the cusp of the world's
ascent into Bitchunry. She'd been exposed to a lot of
hard rads and low gee and had generally become pretty transhuman as
time went by, upgrading with a bewildering array of third-party
enhancements: a vestigial tail, eyes that saw through most of the RF
spectrum, her arms, her fur, dogleg reversible knee joints and a
completely mechanical spine that wasn't prone to any of
the absolutely inane bullshit that plagues the rest of us, like
lower-back pain, intrascapular inflammation, sciatica and slipped
discs.

I thought I lived for fun, but I didn't have anything
on Zed. She only talked when honking and whistling and grabbing and
kissing wouldn't do, and routinely slapped upgrades into
herself on the basis of any whim that crossed her mind, like when
she resolved to do a spacewalk bare-skinned and spent the afternoon
getting tin-plated and iron-lunged.

I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to
strangle her twice as often. She stayed on her spacewalk for a
couple of days, floating around the bubble, making crazy faces at
its mirrored exterior. She had no way of knowing if I was inside,
but she assumed that I was watching. Or maybe she didn't,
and she was making faces for anyone's benefit.

But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless and
her eyes full of the stars she'd seen and her metallic
skin cool with the breath of empty space, and she led me a merry
game of tag through the station, the mess hall where we skidded
sloppy through a wobbly ovoid of rice pudding, the greenhouses where
she burrowed like a gopher and shinnied like a monkey, the living
quarters and bubbles as we interrupted a thousand acts of coitus.

You'd have thought that we'd have
followed it up with an act of our own, and truth be told, that was
certainly my expectation when we started the game I came to think of
as the steeplechase, but we never did. Halfway through, I'd
lose track of carnal urges and return to a state of childlike
innocence, living only for the thrill of the chase and the giggly
feeling I got whenever she found some new, even-more-outrageous
corner to turn. I think we became legendary on the station, that
crazy pair that's always zipping in and zipping away,
like having your party crashed by two naked, coed Marx Brothers.

When I asked her to marry me, to return to Earth with me, to live
with me until the universe's mainspring unwound, she
laughed, honked my nose and my willie and shouted, “YOU'LL
DO!”

I took her home to Toronto and we took up residence ten stories
underground in overflow residence for the University. Our Whuffie
wasn't so hot earthside, and the endless institutional
corridors made her feel at home while affording her opportunities
for mischief.

But bit by bit, the mischief dwindled, and she started talking
more. At first, I admit I was relieved, glad that my strange, silent
wife was finally acting normal, making nice with the neighbors
instead of pranking them with endless honks and fanny-kicks and
squirt guns. We gave up the steeplechase and she had the doglegs
taken out, her fur removed, her eyes unsilvered to a hazel that was
pretty and as fathomable as the silver had been inscrutable.

We wore clothes. We entertained. I started to rehearse my
symphony in low-Whuffie halls and parks with any musicians I could
drum up, and she came out and didn't play, just sat to
the side and smiled and smiled with a smile that never went beyond
her lips.

She went nuts.

She shat herself. She pulled her hair. She cut herself with
knives. She accused me of plotting to kill her. She set fire to the
neighbors' apartments, wrapped herself in plastic
sheeting, dry-humped the furniture.

She went nuts. She did it in broad strokes, painting the walls of
our bedroom with her blood, jagging all night through rant after
rant. I smiled and nodded and faced it for as long as I could, then
I grabbed her and hauled her, kicking like a mule, to the doctor's
office on the second floor. She'd been dirtside for a
year and nuts for a month, but it took me that long to face up to
it.

The doc diagnosed nonchemical dysfunction, which was by way of
saying that it was her mind, not her brain, that was broken. In
other words, I'd driven her nuts.

You can get counseling for nonchemical dysfunction, basically
trying to talk it out, learn to feel better about yourself. She
didn't want to.

She was miserable, suicidal, murderous. In the brief moments of
lucidity that she had under sedation, she consented to being
restored from a backup that was made before we came to Toronto.

I was at her side in the hospital when she woke up. I had
prepared a written synopsis of the events since her last backup for
her, and she read it over the next couple days.

“Julius,” she said,
while I was making breakfast in our subterranean apartment. She
sounded so serious, so fun-free, that I knew immediately that the
news wouldn't be good.

“Yes?” I said,
setting out plates of bacon and eggs, steaming cups of coffee.

“I'm going to go back to space, and revert
to an older version.” She had a
shoulderbag packed, and she had traveling clothes on.

She shook her head, and anger blazed in her utterly scrutable
hazel eyes. “No. I'm going back to who I was,
before I met you.”

It hurt, bad. I had loved the old, steeplechase Zed, had loved
her fun and mischief. The Zed she'd become after we wed
was terrible and terrifying, but I'd stuck with her out
of respect for the person she'd been.

Now she was off to restore herself from a backup made before she
met me. She was going to lop 18 months out of her life, start over
again, revert to a saved version.

Hurt? It ached like a motherfucker.

I went back to the station a month later, and saw her jamming in
the sphere with a guy who had three extra sets of arms depending
from his hips. He scuttled around the sphere while she played a jig
on the piano, and when her silver eyes lit on me, there wasn't
a shred of recognition in them. She'd never met me.

I died some, too, putting the incident out of my head and
sojourning to Disney World, there to reinvent myself with a new
group of friends, a new career, a new life. I never spoke of Zed
again—especially not to Lil, who hardly needed me to
pollute her with remembrances of my crazy exes.

If I was nuts, it wasn't the kind of spectacular nuts
that Zed had gone. It was a slow, seething, ugly nuts that had me
alienating my friends, sabotaging my enemies, driving my girlfriend
into my best friend's arms.

I decided that I would see a doctor, just as soon as we'd
run the rehab past the ad-hoc's general meeting. I had
to get my priorities straight.

I pulled on last night's clothes and walked out to
the Monorail station in the main lobby. The platform was jammed with
happy guests, bright and cheerful and ready for a day of steady,
hypermediated fun. I tried to make myself attend to them as
individuals, but try as I might, they kept turning into a crowd, and
I had to plant my feet firmly on the platform to keep from weaving
among them to the edge, the better to snag a seat.

The meeting was being held over the Sunshine Tree Terrace in
Adventureland, just steps from where I'd been turned
into a road-pizza by the still-unidentified assassin. The
Adventureland ad-hocs owed the Liberty Square crew a favor since my
death had gone down on their turf, so they had given us use of their
prize meeting room, where the Florida sun streamed through the slats
of the shutters, casting a hash of dust-filled shafts of light
across the room. The faint sounds of the tiki-drums and the spieling
Jungle Cruise guides leaked through the room, a low-key ambient buzz
from two of the Park's oldest rides.

There were almost a hundred ad-hocs in the Liberty Square crew,
almost all second-gen castmembers with big, friendly smiles. They
filled the room to capacity, and there was much hugging and
handshaking before the meeting came to order. I was thankful that
the room was too small for the de rigueur ad-hoc
circle-of-chairs, so that Lil was able to stand at a podium and
command a smidge of respect.

“Hi there!” she said,
brightly. The weepy puffiness was still present around her eyes, if
you knew how to look for it, but she was expert at putting on a
brave face no matter what the ache.

The ad-hocs roared back a collective, “Hi, Lil!” and laughed at their own corny tradition. Oh, they sure were
a barrel of laughs at the Magic Kingdom.

“Everybody knows why we're here, right?” Lil said, with a self-deprecating smile. She'd
been lobbying hard for weeks, after all. “Does anyone
have any questions about the plans? We'd like to start
executing right away.”

A guy with deliberately boyish, wholesome features put his arm in
the air. Lil acknowledged him with a nod. “When you say ‘right away,’ do you mean—”

I cut in. “Tonight. After this meeting. We're
on an eight-week production schedule, and the sooner we start, the
sooner it'll be finished.”

Lil said, “Don, we're trying something new
here, a really streamlined process. The good part is, the process is
short. In a couple months, we'll know if it's
working for us. If it's not, hey, we can turn it around
in a couple months, too. That's why we're
not spending as much time planning as we usually do. It won't
take five years for the idea to prove out, so the risks are
lower.”

Another castmember, a woman, apparent 40 with a round, motherly
demeanor said, “I'm all for moving
fast—Lord knows, our pacing hasn't always
been that hot. But I'm concerned about all these new
people you propose to recruit—won't having
more people slow us down when it comes to making new decisions?”

No, I thought sourly, because the people I'm
bringing in aren't addicted to meetings.

Lil nodded. “That's a good point, Lisa.
The offer we're making to the telepresence players is
probationary—they don't get to vote until
after we've agreed that the rehab is a success.”

Another castmember stood. I recognized him: Dave, a heavyset,
self-important jerk who loved to work the front door, even though he
blew his spiel about half the time. “Lillian,” he said, smiling sadly at her, “I think you're
really making a big mistake here. We love the Mansion, all of us,
and so do the guests. It's a piece of history, and
we're its custodians, not its masters. Changing it like
this, well…” he
shook his head. “It's not good stewardship.
If the guests wanted to walk through a funhouse with guys jumping
out of the shadows saying ‘booga-booga,’
they'd go to one of the Halloween Houses in their
hometowns. The Mansion's better than that. I can't
be a part of this plan.”

I wanted to knock the smug grin off his face. I'd
delivered essentially the same polemic a thousand times—in
reference to Debra's work—and hearing it
from this jerk in reference to mine made me go all hot and
red inside.

“Look,” I said. “If
we don't do this, if we don't change things,
they'll get changed for us. By someone else.
The question, Dave, is whether a responsible custodian lets
his custodianship be taken away from him, or whether he does
everything he can to make sure that he's still around to
ensure that his charge is properly cared for. Good custodianship
isn't sticking your head in the sand.”

I could tell I wasn't doing any good. The mood of the
crowd was getting darker, the faces more set. I resolved not to
speak again until the meeting was done, no matter what the
provocation.

Lil smoothed my remarks over, and fielded a dozen more, and it
looked like the objections would continue all afternoon and all
night and all the next day, and I felt woozy and overwrought and
miserable all at the same time, staring at Lil and her harried smile
and her nervous smoothing of her hair over her ears.

Finally, she called the question. By tradition, the votes were
collected in secret and publicly tabulated over the data-channels.
The group's eyes unfocussed as they called up HUDs and
watched the totals as they rolled in. I was offline and unable to
vote or watch.

At length, Lil heaved a relieved sigh and smiled, dropping her
hands behind her back.

“All right then,” she
said, over the crowd's buzz. “Let's
get to work.”

I stood up, saw Dan and Lil staring into each other's
eyes, a meaningful glance between new lovers, and I saw red.
Literally. My vision washed over pink, and a strobe pounded at the
edges of my vision. I took two lumbering steps towards them and
opened my mouth to say something horrible, and what came out was
“Waaagh.” My right side
went numb and my leg slipped out from under me and I crashed to the
floor.

The slatted light from the shutters cast its way across my chest
as I tried to struggle up with my left arm, and then it all went
black.

I wasn't nuts after all.

The doctor's office in the Main Street infirmary was
clean and white and decorated with posters of Jiminy Cricket in
doctors' whites with an outsized stethoscope. I came to
on a hard pallet under a sign that reminded me to get a check-up
twice a year, by gum! and I tried to bring my hands up to shield my
eyes from the over bright light and the over-cheerful signage, and
discovered that I couldn't move my arms. Further
investigation revealed that this was because I was strapped down, in
full-on four-point restraint.

“Waaagh,” I said
again.

Dan's worried face swam into my field of vision,
along with a serious-looking doctor, apparent 70, with a Norman
Rockwell face full of crow'sfeet and smile-lines.

“Welcome back, Julius. I'm Doctor Pete,” the doctor said, in a kindly voice that matched the face.
Despite my recent disillusion with castmember bullshit, I found his
schtick comforting.

I slumped back against the pallet while the doc shone lights in
my eyes and consulted various diagnostic apparati. I bore it in
stoic silence, too confounded by the horrible Waaagh sounds to
attempt more speech. The doc would tell me what was going on when he
was ready.

“Does he need to be tied up still?” Dan asked, and I shook my head urgently. Being tied up
wasn't my idea of a good time.

The doc smiled kindly. “I think it's for
the best, for now. Don't worry, Julius, we'll
have you up and about soon enough.”

Dan protested, but stopped when the doc threatened to send him
out of the room. He took my hand instead.

My nose itched. I tried to ignore it, but it got worse and worse,
until it was all I could think of, the flaming lance of itch that
strobed at the tip of my nostril. Furiously, I wrinkled my face,
rattled at my restraints. The doc absentmindedly noticed my
gyrations and delicately scratched my nose with a gloved finger. The
relief was fantastic. I just hoped my nuts didn't start
itching anytime soon.

Finally, the doctor pulled up a chair and did something that
caused the head of the bed to raise up so that I could look him in
the eye.

“Well, now,” he said,
stroking his chin. “Julius, you've got a
problem. Your friend here tells me your systems have been offline
for more than a month. It sure would've been better if
you'd come in to see me when it started up.

“But you didn't, and things got worse.” He nodded up at Jiminy Cricket's recriminations:
Go ahead, see your doc! “It's good advice,
son, but what's done is done. You were restored from a
backup about eight weeks ago, I see. Without more tests, I can't
be sure, but my theory is that the brain-machine interface they
installed at that time had a material defect. It's been
deteriorating ever since, misfiring and rebooting. The shut-downs
are a protective mechanism, meant to keep it from introducing the
kind of seizure you experienced this afternoon. When the interface
senses malfunction, it shuts itself down and boots a diagnostic
mode, attempts to fix itself and come back online.

“Well, that's fine for minor problems, but
in cases like this, it's bad news. The interface has
been deteriorating steadily, and it's only a matter of
time before it does some serious damage.”

“Waaagh?” I asked. I
meant to say, All right, but what's wrong with my
mouth?

The doc put a finger to my lips. “Don't
try. The interface has locked up, and it's taken some of
your voluntary nervous processes with it. In time, it'll
probably shut down, but for now, there's no point.
That's why we've got you strapped down—you
were thrashing pretty hard when they brought you in, and we didn't
want you to hurt yourself.”

Probably shut down? Jesus. I could end up stuck like
this forever. I started shaking.

The doc soothed me, stroking my hand, and in the process pressed
a transdermal on my wrist. The panic receded as the transdermal's
sedative oozed into my bloodstream.

“There, there,” he
said. “It's nothing permanent. We can grow
you a new clone and refresh it from your last backup. Unfortunately,
that backup is a few months old. If we'd caught it
earlier, we may've been able to salvage a current
backup, but given the deterioration you've displayed to
date… Well, there just wouldn't
be any point.”

My heart hammered. I was going to lose two months—lose
it all, never happened. My assassination, the new Hall of Presidents
and my shameful attempt thereon, the fights with Lil, Lil and Dan,
the meeting. My plans for the rehab! All of it, good and bad, every
moment flensed away.

I couldn't do it. I had a rehab to finish, and I was
the only one who understood how it had to be done. Without my
relentless prodding, the ad-hocs would surely revert to their old,
safe ways. They might even leave it half-done, halt the process for
an interminable review, present a soft belly for Debra to savage.

I wouldn't be restoring from backup.

I had two more seizures before the interface finally gave up and
shut itself down. I remember the first, a confusion of
vision-occluding strobes and uncontrollable thrashing and the taste
of copper, but the second happened without waking me from deep
unconsciousness.

When I came to again in the infirmary, Dan was still there. He
had a day's growth of beard and new worrylines at the
corners of his newly rejuvenated eyes. The doctor came in, shaking
his head.

“Well, now, it seems like the worst is over. I've
drawn up the consent forms for the refresh and the new clone will be
ready in an hour or two. In the meantime, I think heavy sedation is
in order. Once the restore's been completed, we'll
retire this body for you and we'll be all finished
up.”

Retire this body? Kill me, is what it meant.

“No,” I said. I
thrilled in my restraints: my voice was back under my control!

“Oh, really now.” The
doc lost his bedside manner, let his exasperation slip through.
“There's nothing else for it. If you'd
come to me when it all started, well, we might've had
other options. You've got no one to blame but
yourself.”

“No,” I repeated.
“Not now. I won't sign.”

Dan put his hand on mine. I tried to jerk out from under it, but
the restraints and his grip held me fast. “You've
got to do it, Julius. It's for the best,” he said.

“I'm not going to let you kill me,” I said, through clenched teeth. His fingertips were callused,
worked rough with exertion well beyond the normal call of duty.

“No one's killing you, son,” the doctor said. Son, son, son. Who knew how old he was? He
could be 18 for all I knew. “It's just the
opposite: we're saving you. If you continue like this,
it will only get worse. The seizures, mental breakdown, the whole
melon going soft. You don't want that.”

I thought of Zed's spectacular transformation into a
crazy person. No, I sure don't. “I
don't care about the interface. Chop it out. I can't
do it now.” I swallowed. “Later.
After the rehab. Eight more weeks.”

The irony! Once the doc knew I was serious, he sent Dan out of
the room and rolled his eyes up while he placed a call. I saw his
gorge work as he subvocalized. He left me bound to the table, to
wait.

No clocks in the infirmary, and no internal clock, and it may
have been ten minutes or five hours. I was catheterized, but I
didn't know it until urgent necessity made the discovery
for me.

When the doc came back, he held a small device that I instantly
recognized: a HERF gun.

Oh, it wasn't the same model I'd used on
the Hall of Presidents. This one was smaller, and better made, with
the precise engineering of a surgical tool. The doc raised his
eyebrows at me. “You know what this is,” he said, flatly. A dim corner of my mind gibbered, he
knows, he knows, the Hall of Presidents. But he didn't
know. That episode was locked in my mind, invulnerable to backup.

“I know,” I said.

“This one is high-powered in the extreme. It will
penetrate the interface's shielding and fuse it. It
probably won't turn you into a vegetable. That's
the best I can do. If this fails, we will restore you from your last
backup. You have to sign the consent before I use it.” He'd dropped all kindly pretense from his voice,
not bothering to disguise his disgust. I was pitching out the
miracle of the Bitchun Society, the thing that had all but obsoleted
the medical profession: why bother with surgery when you can grow a
clone, take a backup, and refresh the new body? Some people swapped
corpuses just to get rid of a cold.

I signed. The doc wheeled my gurney into the crash and hum of the
utilidors and then put it on a freight tram that ran to the
Imagineering compound, and thence to a heavy, exposed Faraday cage.
Of course: using the HERF on me would kill any electronics in the
neighborhood. They had to shield me before they pulled the trigger.

The doc placed the gun on my chest and loosened my restraints. He
sealed the cage and retreated to the lab's door. He
pulled a heavy apron and helmet with faceguard from a hook beside
the door.

“Once I am outside the door, point it at your head and
pull the trigger. I'll come back in five minutes. Once I
am in the room, place the gun on the floor and do not touch it. It
is only good for a single usage, but I have no desire to find out
I'm wrong.”

He closed the door. I took the pistol in my hand. It was heavy,
dense with its stored energy, the tip a parabolic hollow to better
focus its cone.

I lifted the gun to my temple and let it rest there. My thumb
found the trigger-stud.

I paused. This wouldn't kill me, but it might lock
the interface forever, paralyzing me, turning me into a thrashing
maniac. I knew that I would never be able to pull the trigger. The
doc must've known, too—this was his way of
convincing me to let him do that restore.

I opened my mouth to call the doc, and what came out was
“Waaagh!”

The seizure started. My arm jerked and my thumb nailed the stud,
and there was an ozone tang. The seizure stopped.

I had no more interface.

The doc looked sour and pinched when he saw me sitting up on the
gurney, rubbing at my biceps. He produced a handheld diagnostic tool
and pointed it at my melon, then pronounced every bit of digital
microcircuitry in it dead. For the first time since my twenties, I
was no more advanced than nature had made me.

The restraints left purple bruises at my wrists and ankles, where
I'd thrashed against them. I hobbled out of the Faraday
cage and the lab under my own power, but just barely, my muscles
groaning from the inadvertent isometric exercises of my seizure.

Dan was waiting in the utilidor, crouched and dozing against the
wall. The doc shook him awake and his head snapped up, his hand
catching the doc's in a lightning-quick reflex. It was
easy to forget Dan's old line of work here in the Magic
Kingdom, but when he smoothly snagged the doc's arm and
sprang to his feet, eyes hard and alert, I remembered. My old pal,
the action hero.

Quickly, Dan released the doc and apologized. He assessed my
physical state and wordlessly wedged his shoulder in my armpit,
supporting me. I didn't have the strength to stop him. I
needed sleep.

“I'm taking you home,” he said. “We'll fight Debra off
tomorrow.”

“Sure,” I said, and
boarded the waiting tram.

But we didn't go home. Dan took me back to my hotel,
the Contemporary, and brought me up to my door. He keycarded the
lock and stood awkwardly as I hobbled into the empty room that was
my new home, as I collapsed into the bed that was mine now.

With an apologetic look, he slunk away, back to Lil and the house
we'd shared.

I slapped on a sedative transdermal that the doc had given me,
and added a mood-equalizer that he'd recommended to
control my “personality swings.” In seconds, I was asleep.

CHAPTER 7

The meds helped me cope with the next couple of days, starting
the rehab on the Mansion. We worked all night erecting a scaffolding
around the facade, though no real work would be done on it—we
wanted the appearance of rapid progress, and besides, I had an idea.

I worked alongside Dan, using him as a personal secretary,
handling my calls, looking up plans, monitoring the Net for the
first grumblings as the Disney-going public realized that the
Mansion was being taken down for a full-blown rehab. We didn't
exchange any unnecessary words, standing side by side without ever
looking into one another's eyes. I couldn't
really feel awkward around Dan, anyway. He never let me, and besides
we had our hands full directing disappointed guests away from the
Mansion. A depressing number of them headed straight for the Hall of
Presidents.

We didn't have to wait long for the first panicked
screed about the Mansion to appear. Dan read it aloud off his HUD:
“Hey! Anyone hear anything about scheduled maintenance at
the HM? I just buzzed by on the way to the new H of P's
and it looks like some big stuff's afoot—scaffolding,
castmembers swarming in and out, see the pic. I hope they're
not screwing up a good thing. BTW, don't miss the new H
of P's—very Bitchun.”

“Right,” I said.
“Who's the author, and is he on the list?”

Dan cogitated a moment. “She is Kim Wright,
and she's on the list. Good Whuffie, lots of Mansion
fanac, big readership.”

“Call her,” I said.

This was the plan: recruit rabid fans right away, get 'em
in costume, and put 'em up on the scaffolds. Give them
outsized, bat-adorned tools and get them to play at construction
activity in thumpy, undead pantomime. In time, Suneep and his gang
would have a batch of telepresence robots up and running, and we'd
move to them, get them wandering the queue area, interacting with
curious guests. The new Mansion would be open for business in 48
hours, albeit in stripped-down fashion. The scaffolding made for a
nice weenie, a visual draw that would pull the hordes that thronged
Debra's Hall of Presidents over for a curious peek or
two. Buzz city.

I'm a pretty smart guy.

Dan paged this Kim person and spoke to her as she was debarking
the Pirates of the Caribbean. I wondered if she was the right person
for the job: she seemed awfully enamored of the rehabs that Debra
and her crew had performed. If I'd had more time, I
would've run a deep background check on every one of the
names on my list, but that would've taken months.

Dan made some small talk with Kim, speaking aloud in deference to
my handicap, before coming to the point. “We read your
post about the Mansion's rehab. You're the
first one to notice it, and we wondered if you'd be
interested in coming by to find out a little more about our
plans.”

Dan winced. “She's a screamer,” he whispered.

Reflexively, I tried to pull up a HUD with my files on the
Mansion fans we hoped to recruit. Of course, nothing happened. I'd
done that a dozen times that morning, and there was no end in sight.
I couldn't seem to get lathered up about it, though, nor
about anything else, not even the hickey just visible under Dan's
collar. The transdermal mood-balancer on my bicep was seeing to
that—doctor's orders.

She didn't. She arrived out of breath and excited,
jogging. She was apparent 20, and dressed like a real 20 year old,
in a hipster climate-control cowl that clung to and released her
limbs, which were long and double-kneed. All the rage among the
younger set, including the girl who'd shot me.

But the resemblance to my killer ended with her dress and body.
She wasn't wearing a designer face, rather one that had
enough imperfections to be the one she was born with, eyes set close
and nose wide and slightly squashed.

I admired the way she moved through the crowd, fast and low but
without jostling anyone. “Kim,” I called as she drew near. “Over here.”

She gave a happy shriek and made a beeline for us. Even charging
full-bore, she was good enough at navigating the crowd that she
didn't brush against a single soul. When she reached us,
she came up short and bounced a little. “Hi, I'm
Kim!” she said, pumping my arm with
the peculiar violence of the extra-jointed. “Julius,” I said, then waited while she repeated the process with Dan.

“So,” she said,
“what's the deal?”

I took her hand. “Kim, we've got a job for
you, if you're interested.”

She squeezed my hand hard and her eyes shone. “I'll
take it!” she said.

I laughed, and so did Dan. It was a polite, castmembery sort of
laugh, but underneath it was relief. “I think I'd
better explain it to you first,” I
said.

“Explain away!” she
said, and gave my hand another squeeze.

I let go of her hand and ran down an abbreviated version of the
rehab plans, leaving out anything about Debra and her ad-hocs. Kim
drank it all in greedily. She cocked her head at me as I ran it
down, eyes wide. It was disconcerting, and I finally asked, “Are
you recording this?”

Kim blushed. “I hope that's okay! I'm
starting a new Mansion scrapbook. I have one for every ride in the
Park, but this one's gonna be a world-beater!”

Here was something I hadn't thought about. Publishing
ad-hoc business was tabu inside Park, so much so that it hadn't
occurred to me that the new castmembers we brought in would want to
record every little detail and push it out over the Net as a big old
Whuffie collector.

“I can switch it off,” Kim
said. She looked worried, and I really started to grasp how
important the Mansion was to the people we were recruiting, how much
of a privilege we were offering them.

“Leave it rolling,” I
said. “Let's show the world how it's
done.”

We led Kim into a utilidor and down to costuming. She was
half-naked by the time we got there, literally tearing off her
clothes in anticipation of getting into character. Sonya, a Liberty
Square ad-hoc that we'd stashed at costuming, already
had clothes waiting for her, a rotting maid's uniform
with an oversized toolbelt.

We left Kim on the scaffolding, energetically troweling a
water-based cement substitute onto the wall, scraping it off and
moving to a new spot. It looked boring to me, but I could believe
that we'd have to tear her away when the time came.

We went back to trawling the Net for the next candidate.

By lunchtime, there were ten drilling, hammering, troweling new
castmembers around the scaffolding, pushing black wheelbarrows,
singing “Grim Grinning Ghosts” and generally having a high old time.

“This'll do,” I
said to Dan. I was exhausted and soaked with sweat, and the
transdermal under my costume itched. Despite the happy-juice in my
bloodstream, a streak of uncastmemberly crankiness was shot through
my mood. I needed to get offstage.

Dan helped me hobble away, and as we hit the utilidor, he
whispered in my ear, “This was a great idea, Julius.
Really.”

We jumped a tram over to Imagineering, my chest swollen with
pride. Suneep had three of his assistants working on the first
generation of mobile telepresence robots for the exterior, and had
promised a prototype for that afternoon. The robots were easy
enough—just off-the-shelf stuff, really—but
the costumes and kinematics routines were something else. Thinking
about what he and Suneep's gang of hypercreative
super-geniuses would come up with cheered me up a little, as did
being out of the public eye.

Suneep's lab looked like it had been hit by a
tornado. Imagineer packs rolled in and out with arcane gizmos, or
formed tight argumentative knots in the corners as they shouted over
whatever their HUDs were displaying. In the middle of it all was
Suneep, who looked like he was barely restraining an urge to shout
Yippee! He was clearly in his element.

He threw his arms open when he caught sight of Dan and me, threw
them wide enough to embrace the whole mad, gibbering chaos. “What
wonderful flumgubbery!” he shouted,
over the noise.

“Sure is,” I agreed.
“How's the prototype coming?”

Suneep waved absently, his short fingers describing trivialities
in the air. “In due time, in due time. I've
put that team onto something else, a kinematics routine for a class
of flying spooks that use gasbags to stay aloft—silent
and scary. It's old spy-tech, and the retrofit's
coming tremendously. Take a look!” He
pointed a finger at me and, presumably, squirted some data my way.

“I'm offline,” I
reminded him gently.

He slapped his forehead, took a moment to push his hair off his
face, and gave me an apologetic wave. “Of course, of
course. Here.” He unrolled an LCD
and handed it to me. A flock of spooks danced on the screen,
rendered against the ballroom scene. They were thematically
consistent with the existing Mansion ghosts, more funny than scary,
and their faces were familiar. I looked around the lab and realized
that they'd caricatured various Imagineers.

“This is terrific,” I
said, carefully. “But I really need some robots up and
running by tomorrow night, Suneep. We discussed this, remember?” Without telepresence robots, my recruiting would be limited
to fans like Kim, who lived in the area. I had broader designs than
that.

Suneep looked disappointed. “Of course. We discussed
it. I don't like to stop my people when they have good
ideas, but there's a time and a place. I'll
put them on it right away. Leave it to me.”

Dan turned to greet someone, and I looked to see who it was. Lil.
Of course. She was raccoon-eyed with fatigue, and she reached out
for Dan's hand, saw me, and changed her mind.

“Hi, guys,” she said,
with studied casualness.

“Oh, hello!” said
Suneep. He fired his finger at her—the flying ghosts, I
imagined. Lil's eyes rolled up for a moment, then she
nodded exhaustedly at him.

“Very good,” she
said. “I just heard from Lisa. She says the indoor crews
are on-schedule. They've got most of the animatronics
dismantled, and they're taking down the glass in the
Ballroom now.” The Ballroom ghost
effects were accomplished by means of a giant pane of polished glass
that laterally bisected the room. The Mansion had been built around
it—it was too big to take out in one piece. “They
say it'll be a couple days before they've
got it cut up and ready to remove.”

A pocket of uncomfortable silence descended on us, the roar of
the Imagineers rushing in to fill it.

“You must be exhausted,” Dan
said, at length.

“Goddamn right,” I
said, at the same moment that Lil said, “I guess I am.”

We both smiled wanly. Suneep put his arms around Lil's
and my shoulders and squeezed. He smelled of an exotic cocktail of
industrial lubricant, ozone, and fatigue poisons.

“You two should go home and give each other a
massage,” he said. “You've
earned some rest.”

Dan met my eye and shook his head apologetically. I squirmed out
from under Suneep's arm and thanked him quietly, then
slunk off to the Contemporary for a hot tub and a couple hours of
sleep.

I came back to the Mansion at sundown. It was cool enough that I
took a surface route, costume rolled in a shoulderbag, instead of
riding through the clattering, air-conditioned comfort of the
utilidors.

As a freshening breeze blew across me, I suddenly had a craving
for real weather, the kind of climate I'd grown
up with in Toronto. It was October, for chrissakes, and a lifetime
of conditioning told me that it was May. I stopped and leaned on a
bench for a moment and closed my eyes. Unbidden, and with the
clarity of a HUD, I saw High Park in Toronto, clothed in its autumn
colors, fiery reds and oranges, shades of evergreen and earthy
brown. God, I needed a vacation.

I opened my eyes and realized that I was standing in front of the
Hall of Presidents, and that there was a queue ahead of me for it,
one that stretched back and back. I did a quick sum in my head and
sucked air between my teeth: they had enough people for five or six
full houses waiting here—easily an hour's
wait. The Hall never drew crowds like this. Debra was
working the turnstiles in Betsy Ross gingham, and she caught my eye
and snapped a nod at me.

I stalked off to the Mansion. A choir of zombie-shambling new
recruits had formed up in front of the gate, and were groaning their
way through “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” with a new call-and-response structure. A small audience
participated, urged on by the recruits on the scaffolding.

“Well, at least that's going right,” I muttered to myself. And it was, except that I could see
members of the ad-hoc looking on from the sidelines, and the looks
weren't kindly. Totally obsessive fans are a good
measure of a ride's popularity, but they're
kind of a pain in the ass, too. They lipsynch the soundtrack, cadge
souvenirs and pester you with smarmy, show-off questions. After a
while, even the cheeriest castmember starts to lose patience,
develop an automatic distaste for them.

The Liberty Square ad-hocs who were working on the Mansion had
been railroaded into approving a rehab, press-ganged into working on
it, and were now forced to endure the company of these grandstanding
megafans. If I'd been there when it all
started—instead of sleeping!—I may've
been able to massage their bruised egos, but now I wondered if it
was too late.

Nothing for it but to do it. I ducked into a utilidor, changed
into my costume and went back onstage. I joined the
call-and-response enthusiastically, walking around to the ad-hocs
and getting them to join in, reluctantly or otherwise.

By the time the choir retired, sweaty and exhausted, a group of
ad-hocs were ready to take their place, and I escorted my recruits
to an offstage break-room.

Suneep didn't deliver the robot prototypes for a
week, and told me that it would be another week before I could have
even five production units. Though he didn't say it, I
got the sense that his guys were out of control, so excited by the
freedom from ad-hoc oversight that they were running wild. Suneep
himself was nearly a wreck, nervous and jumpy. I didn't
press it.

Besides, I had problems of my own. The new recruits were
multiplying. I was staying on top of the fan response to the rehab
from a terminal I'd had installed in my hotel room. Kim
and her local colleagues were fielding millions of hits every day,
their Whuffie accumulating as envious fans around the world logged
in to watch their progress on the scaffolding.

That was all according to plan. What wasn't according
to plan was that the new recruits were doing their own recruiting,
extending invitations to their net-pals to come on down to Florida,
bunk on their sofas and guest-beds, and present themselves to me for
active duty.

The tenth time it happened, I approached Kim in the break-room.
Her gorge was working, her eyes tracked invisible words across the
middle distance. No doubt she was penning yet another breathless
missive about the magic of working in the Mansion. “Hey,
there,” I said. “Have
you got a minute to meet with me?”

She held up a single finger, then, a moment later, gave me a
bright smile.

“Hi, Julius!” she
said. “Sure!”

“Why don't you change into civvies,
we'll take a walk through the Park and talk?”

Kim wore her costume every chance she got. I'd been
quite firm about her turning it in to the laundry every night
instead of wearing it home.

Reluctantly, she stepped into a change-room and switched into her
cowl. We took the utilidor to the Fantasyland exit and walked
through the late-afternoon rush of children and their adults, queued
deep and thick for Snow White, Dumbo and Peter Pan.

“How're you liking it here?” I asked.

Kim gave a little bounce. “Oh, Julius, it's
the best time of my life, really! A dream come true. I'm
meeting so many interesting people, and I'm really
feeling creative. I can't wait to try out the
telepresence rigs, too.”

“Well, I'm really pleased with what you
and your friends are up to here. You're working hard,
putting on a good show. I like the songs you've been
working up, too.”

She did one of those double-kneed shuffles that was the basis of
any number of action vids those days and she was suddenly standing
in front of me, hand on my shoulder, looking into my eyes. She
looked serious.

“Is there a problem, Julius? If there is, I'd
rather we just talked about it, instead of making chitchat.”

I smiled and took her hand off my shoulder. “How old
are you, Kim?”

“Nineteen,” she said.
“What's the problem?”

Nineteen! Jesus, no wonder she was so volatile. What's
my excuse, then?

“It's not a problem, Kim, it's
just something I wanted to discuss with you. The people you-all have
been bringing down to work for me, they're all really
great castmembers.”

“But?”

“But we have limited resources around here. Not enough
hours in the day for me to stay on top of the new folks, the rehab,
everything. Not to mention that until we open the new Mansion,
there's a limited number of extras we can use out front.
I'm concerned that we're going to put
someone on stage without proper training, or that we're
going to run out of uniforms; I'm also concerned about
people coming all the way here and discovering that there aren't
any shifts for them to take.”

She gave me a relieved look. “Is that all?
Don't worry about it. I've been talking to
Debra, over at the Hall of Presidents, and she says she can pick up
any people who can't be used at the Mansion—we
could even rotate back and forth!” She
was clearly proud of her foresight.

My ears buzzed. Debra, one step ahead of me all along the way.
She probably suggested that Kim do some extra recruiting in the
first place. She'd take in the people who came down to
work the Mansion, convince them they'd been hard done by
the Liberty Square crew, and rope them into her little Whuffie
ranch, the better to seize the Mansion, the Park, the whole of Walt
Disney World.

“Oh, I don't think it'll come
to that,” I said, carefully.
“I'm sure we can find a use for them all at
the Mansion. More the merrier.”

Kim cocked quizzical, but let it go. I bit my tongue. The pain
brought me back to reality, and I started planning costume
production, training rosters, bunking. God, if only Suneep would
finish the robots!

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I said, hotly.

Lil folded her arms and glared. “No, Julius. It
won't fly. The group is already upset that all the glory
is going to the new people, they'll never let us bring
more in. They also won't stop working on the rehab to
train them, costume them, feed them and mother them. They're
losing Whuffie every day that the Mansion's shut up, and
they don't want any more delays. Dave's
already joined up with Debra, and I'm sure he's
not the last one.”

Dave—the jerk who'd pissed all over the
rehab in the meeting. Of course he'd gone over. Lil and
Dan stood side by side on the porch of the house where I'd
lived. I'd driven out that night to convince Lil to sell
the ad-hocs on bringing in more recruits, but it wasn't
going according to plan. They wouldn't even let me in
the house.

“So what do I tell Kim?”

“Tell her whatever you want,” Lil said. “You brought her in—you
manage her. Take some goddamn responsibility for once in your
life.”

It wasn't going to get any better. Dan gave me an
apologetic look. Lil glared a moment longer, then went into the
house.

“Debra's doing real well,” he said. “The net's all over her.
Biggest thing ever. Flash-baking is taking off in nightclubs, dance
mixes with the DJ's backup being shoved in bursts into
the dancers.”

“God,” I said. “I
fucked up, Dan. I fucked it all up.”

He didn't say anything, and that was the same as
agreeing.

Driving back to the hotel, I decided I needed to talk to Kim. She
was a problem I didn't need, and maybe a problem I could
solve. I pulled a screeching U-turn and drove the little runabout to
her place, a tiny condo in a crumbling complex that had once been a
gated seniors' village, pre-Bitchun.

Her place was easy to spot. All the lights were burning, faint
conversation audible through the screen door. I jogged up the steps
two at a time, and was about to knock when a familiar voice drifted
through the screen.

Debra, saying: “Oh yes, oh yes! Terrific idea! I'd
never really thought about using streetmosphere players to liven up
the queue area, but you're making a lot of sense. You
people have just been doing the best work over at the
Mansion—find me more like you and I'll take
them for the Hall any day!”

I heard Kim and her young friends chatting excitedly, proudly.
The anger and fear suffused me from tip to toe, and I felt suddenly
light and cool and ready to do something terrible.

I padded silently down the steps and got into my runabout.

Some people never learn. I'm one of them, apparently.

I almost chortled over the foolproof simplicity of my plan as I
slipped in through the cast entrance using the ID card I'd
scored when my systems went offline and I was no longer able to
squirt my authorization at the door.

I changed clothes in a bathroom on Main Street, switching into a
black cowl that completely obscured my features, then slunk through
the shadows along the storefronts until I came to the moat around
Cinderella's castle. Keeping low, I stepped over the
fence and duck-walked down the embankment, then slipped into the
water and sloshed across to the Adventureland side.

Slipping along to the Liberty Square gateway, I flattened myself
in doorways whenever I heard maintenance crews passing in the
distance, until I reached the Hall of Presidents, and in a twinkling
I was inside the theater itself.

Humming the Small World theme, I produced a short wrecking bar
from my cowl's tabbed pocket and set to work.

The primary broadcast units were hidden behind a painted scrim
over the stage, and they were surprisingly well built for a first
generation tech. I really worked up a sweat smashing them, but I
kept at it until not a single component remained recognizable. The
work was slow and loud in the silent Park, but it lulled me into a
sleepy reverie, an autohypnotic swing-bang-swing-bang timeless time.
To be on the safe side, I grabbed the storage units and slipped them
into the cowl.

Locating their backup units was a little trickier, but years of
hanging out at the Hall of Presidents while Lil tinkered with the
animatronics helped me. I methodically investigated every nook,
cranny and storage area until I located them, in what had been a
break-room closet. By now, I had the rhythm of the thing, and I made
short work of them.

I did one more pass, wrecking anything that looked like it might
be a prototype for the next generation or notes that would help them
reconstruct the units I'd smashed.

I had no illusions about Debra's
preparedness—she'd have something offsite
that she could get up and running in a few days. I wasn't
doing anything permanent, I was just buying myself a day or two.

I made my way clean out of the Park without being spotted, and
sloshed my way into my runabout, shoes leaking water from the moat.

For the first time in weeks, I slept like a baby.

Of course, I got caught. I don't really have the
temperament for Machiavellian shenanigans, and I left a trail a mile
wide, from the muddy footprints in the Contemporary's
lobby to the wrecking bar thoughtlessly left behind, with my cowl
and the storage units from the Hall, forgotten on the back seat of
my runabout.

I whistled my personal jazzy uptempo version of “Grim
Grinning Ghosts” as I made my way
from Costuming, through the utilidor, out to Liberty Square, a few
minutes before the Park opened.

Standing in front of me were Lil and Debra. Debra was holding my
cowl and wrecking bar. Lil held the storage units.

I hadn't put on my transdermals that morning, and so
the emotion I felt was unmuffled, loud and yammering.

I ran.

I ran past them, along the road to Adventureland, past the Tiki
Room where I'd been killed, past the Adventureland gate
where I'd waded through the moat, down Main Street. I
ran and ran, elbowing early guests, trampling flowers, knocking over
an apple cart across from the Penny Arcade.

I ran until I reached the main gate, and turned, thinking I'd
outrun Lil and Debra and all my problems. I'd thought
wrong. They were both there, a step behind me, puffing and red.
Debra held my wrecking bar like a weapon, and she brandished it at
me.

“You're a goddamn idiot, you know that?” she said. I think if we'd been alone, she
would've swung it at me.

“Can't take it when someone else plays
rough, huh, Debra?” I sneered.

Lil shook her head disgustedly. “She's
right, you are an idiot. The ad-hoc's meeting in
Adventureland. You're coming.”

“We're going to talk about the future,
Julius, what's left of it for us.”

“For God's sake, Lil, can't
you see what's going on? They killed me! They
did it, and now we're fighting each other instead of
her! Why can't you see how wrong that is?”

“You'd better watch those accusations,
Julius,” Debra said, quietly and
intensely, almost hissing. “I don't know who
killed you or why, but you're the one who's
guilty here. You need help.”

I barked a humorless laugh. Guests were starting to stream into
the now-open Park, and several of them were watching intently as the
three costumed castmembers shouted at each other. I could feel my
Whuffie hemorrhaging. “Debra, you are purely full of
shit, and your work is trite and unimaginative. You're a
fucking despoiler and you don't even have the guts to
admit it.”

Debra walked a pace behind me, Lil a pace before, all the way
through the crowd to Adventureland. I saw a dozen opportunities to
slip into a gap in the human ebb and flow and escape custody, but I
didn't try. I wanted a chance to tell the whole world
what I'd done and why I'd done it.

Debra followed us in when we mounted the steps to the meeting
room. Lil turned. “I don't think you should
be here, Debra,” she said in
measured tones.

Debra shook her head. “You can't keep me
out, you know. And you shouldn't want to. We're
on the same side.”

I snorted derisively, and I think it decided Lil. “Come
on, then,” she said.

It was SRO in the meeting room, packed to the gills with the
entire ad-hoc, except for my new recruits. No work was being done on
the rehab, then, and the Liberty Belle would be sitting at her dock.
Even the restaurant crews were there. Liberty Square must've
been a ghost town. It gave the meeting a sense of urgency: the
knowledge that there were guests in Liberty Square wandering
aimlessly, looking for castmembers to help them out. Of course,
Debra's crew might've been around.

The crowd's faces were hard and bitter, leaving no
doubt in my mind that I was in deep shit. Even Dan, sitting in the
front row, looked angry. I nearly started crying right then.
Dan—oh, Dan. My pal, my confidant, my patsy, my rival,
my nemesis. Dan, Dan, Dan. I wanted to beat him to death and hug him
at the same time.

Lil took the podium and tucked stray hairs behind her ears.
“All right, then,” she
said. I stood to her left and Debra stood to her right.

“Thanks for coming out today. I'd like to
get this done quickly. We all have important work to get to. I'll
run down the facts: last night, a member of this ad-hoc vandalized
the Hall of Presidents, rendering it useless. It's
estimated that it will take at least a week to get it back up and
running.

“I don't have to tell you that this
isn't acceptable. This has never happened before, and it
will never happen again. We're going to see to that.

“I'd like to propose that no further work
be done on the Mansion until the Hall of Presidents is fully
operational. I will be volunteering my services on the repairs.”

There were nods in the audience. Lil wouldn't be the
only one working at the Hall that week. “Disney World
isn't a competition,” Lil
said. “All the different ad-hocs work together, and we do
it to make the Park as good as we can. We lose sight of that at our
peril.”

I nearly gagged on bile. “I'd like to say
something,” I said, as calmly as I
could manage.

Lil shot me a look. “That's fine, Julius.
Any member of the ad-hoc can speak.”

I took a deep breath. “I did it, all right?” I said. My voice cracked. “I did it, and I don't
have any excuse for having done it. It may not have been the
smartest thing I've ever done, but I think you all
should understand how I was driven to it.

“We're not supposed to be in
competition with one another here, but we all know that that's
just a polite fiction. The truth is that there's real
competition in the Park, and that the hardest players are the crew
that rehabbed the Hall of Presidents. They stole the Hall
from you! They did it while you were distracted, they used me
to engineer the distraction, they murdered me!” I heard the shriek creeping into my voice, but I couldn't
do anything about it.

“Usually, the lie that we're all on the
same side is fine. It lets us work together in peace. But that
changed the day they had me shot. If you keep on believing it,
you're going to lose the Mansion, the Liberty Belle, Tom
Sawyer Island—all of it. All the history we have with
this place—all the history that the billions who've
visited it have—it's going to be destroyed
and replaced with the sterile, thoughtless shit that's
taken over the Hall. Once that happens, there's nothing
left that makes this place special. Anyone can get the same
experience sitting at home on the sofa! What happens then, huh? How
much longer do you think this place will stay open once the only
people here are you?”

Debra smiled condescendingly. “Are you finished,
then?” she asked, sweetly. “Fine.
I know I'm not a member of this group, but since it was
my work that was destroyed last night, I think I would like to
address Julius's statements, if you don't
mind.” She paused, but no one spoke
up.

“First of all, I want you all to know that we don't
hold you responsible for what happened last night. We know who was
responsible, and he needs help. I urge you to see to it that he gets
it.

“Next, I'd like to say that as far as
I'm concerned, we are on the same side—the
side of the Park. This is a special place, and it couldn't
exist without all of our contributions. What happened to Julius was
terrible, and I sincerely hope that the person responsible is caught
and brought to justice. But that person wasn't me or any
of the people in my ad-hoc.

“Lil, I'd like to thank you for your
generous offer of assistance, and we'll take you up on
it. That goes for all of you—come on by the Hall,
we'll put you to work. We'll be up and
running in no time.

“Now, as far as the Mansion goes, let me say this once
and for all: neither me nor my ad-hoc have any desire to take over
the operations of the Mansion. It is a terrific attraction, and
it's getting better with the work you're all
doing. If you've been worrying about it, then you can
stop worrying now. We're all on the same side.

“Thanks for hearing me out. I've got to go
see my team now.”

She turned and left, a chorus of applause following her out.

Lil waited until it died down, then said, “All right,
then, we've got work to do, too. I'd like to
ask you all a favor, first. I'd like us to keep the
details of last night's incident to ourselves. Letting
the guests and the world know about this ugly business isn't
good for anyone. Can we all agree to do that?”

There was a moment's pause while the results were
tabulated on the HUDs, then Lil gave them a million-dollar smile.
“I knew you'd come through. Thanks, guys.
Let's get to work.”

I spent the day at the hotel, listlessly scrolling around on my
terminal. Lil had made it very clear to me after the meeting that I
wasn't to show my face inside the Park until I'd
“gotten help,” whatever
that meant.

By noon, the news was out. It was hard to pin down the exact
source, but it seemed to revolve around the new recruits. One of
them had told their net-pals about the high drama in Liberty Square,
and mentioned my name.

There were already a couple of sites vilifying me, and I expected
more. I needed some kind of help, that was for sure.

I thought about leaving then, turning my back on the whole
business and leaving Walt Disney World to start yet another new
life, Whuffie-poor and fancy-free.

It wouldn't be so bad. I'd been in poor
repute before, not so long ago. That first time Dan and I had palled
around, back at the U of T, I'd been the center of a lot
of pretty ambivalent sentiment, and Whuffie-poor as a man can be.

I slept in a little coffin on-campus, perfectly climate
controlled. It was cramped and dull, but my access to the network
was free and I had plenty of material to entertain myself. While I
couldn't get a table in a restaurant, I was free to
queue up at any of the makers around town and get myself whatever I
wanted to eat and drink, whenever I wanted it. Compared to 99.99999
percent of all the people who'd ever lived, I had a life
of unparalleled luxury.

Even by the standards of the Bitchun Society, I was hardly a
rarity. The number of low-esteem individuals at large was
significant, and they got along just fine, hanging out in parks,
arguing, reading, staging plays, playing music.

Of course, that wasn't the life for me. I had Dan to
pal around with, a rare high-net-Whuffie individual who was willing
to fraternize with a shmuck like me. He'd stand me to
meals at sidewalk cafes and concerts at the SkyDome, and shoot down
any snotty reputation-punk who sneered at my Whuffie tally. Being
with Dan was a process of constantly reevaluating my beliefs in the
Bitchun Society, and I'd never had a more vibrant,
thought-provoking time in all my life.

I could have left the Park, deadheaded to anywhere in the world,
started over. I could have turned my back on Dan, on Debra, on Lil
and the whole mess.

I didn't.

I called up the doc.

CHAPTER 8

Doctor Pete answered on the third ring, audio-only. In the
background, I heard a chorus of crying children, the constant
backdrop of the Magic Kingdom infirmary.

“Hi, doc,” I said.

“Hello, Julius. What can I do for you?” Under the veneer of professional medical and castmember
friendliness, I sensed irritation.

Make it all good again. “I'm not
really sure. I wanted to see if I could talk it over with you. I'm
having some pretty big problems.”

“I'm on-shift until five. Can it wait
until then?”

By then, I had no idea if I'd have the nerve to see
him. “I don't think so—I was
hoping we could meet right away.”

“If it's an emergency, I can have an
ambulance sent for you.”

“It's urgent, but not an emergency. I need
to talk about it in person. Please?”

He sighed in undoctorly, uncastmemberly fashion. “Julius,
I've got important things to do here. Are you sure this
can't wait?”

I bit back a sob. “I'm sure, doc.”

“All right then. When can you be here?”

Lil had made it clear that she didn't want me in the
Park. “Can you meet me? I can't really come
to you. I'm at the Contemporary, Tower B, room 2334.”

“I don't really make house calls, son.”

“I know, I know.” I
hated how pathetic I sounded. “Can you make an exception?
I don't know who else to turn to.”

“I'll be there as soon as I can. I'll
have to get someone to cover for me. Let's not make a
habit of this, all right?”

I whooshed out my relief. “I promise.”

He disconnected abruptly, and I found myself dialing Dan.

“Yes?” he said,
cautiously.

“Doctor Pete is coming over, Dan. I don't
know if he can help me—I don't know if
anyone can. I just wanted you to know.”

He surprised me, then, and made me remember why he was still my
friend, even after everything. “Do you want me to come
over?”

“That would be very nice,” I
said, quietly. “I'm at the hotel.”

“Give me ten minutes,” he
said, and rang off.

He found me on my patio, looking out at the Castle and the peaks
of Space Mountain. To my left spread the sparkling waters of the
Seven Seas Lagoon, to my right, the Property stretched away for mile
after manicured mile. The sun was warm on my skin, faint strains of
happy laughter drifted with the wind, and the flowers were in bloom.
In Toronto, it would be freezing rain, gray buildings, noisome rapid
transit (a monorail hissed by), and hard-faced anonymity. I missed
it.

Dan pulled up a chair next to mine and sat without a word. We
both stared out at the view for a long while.

“Lil and I are through. It should never have happened
in the first place, and I'm not proud of myself. If you
two were breaking up, that's none of my business, but I
had no right to hurry it along.”

“All right,” I said.
I was too drained for emotion.

“I've taken a room here, moved my
things.”

“How's Lil taking it?”

“Oh, she thinks I'm a total bastard. I
suppose she's right.”

“I suppose she's partly right,” I corrected him.

He gave me a gentle slug in the shoulder. “Thanks.”

We waited in companionable silence until the doc arrived.

He bustled in, his smile lines drawn up into a sour purse and
waited expectantly. I left Dan on the patio while I took a seat on
the bed.

“I'm cracking up or something,” I said. “I've been acting erratically,
sometimes violently. I don't know what's
wrong with me.” I'd
rehearsed the speech, but it still wasn't easy to choke
out.

“We both know what's wrong, Julius,” the doc said, impatiently. “You need to be
refreshed from your backup, get set up with a fresh clone and retire
this one. We've had this talk.”

“I can't do it,” I said, not meeting his eye. “I just
can't—isn't there another
way?”

The doc shook his head. “Julius, I've got
limited resources to allocate. There's a perfectly good
cure for what's ailing you, and if you won't
take it, there's not much I can do for you.”

“But what about meds?”

“Your problem isn't a chemical imbalance,
it's a mental defect. Your brain is broken,
son. All that meds will do is mask the symptoms, while you get
worse. I can't tell you what you want to hear,
unfortunately. Now, If you're ready to take the cure, I
can retire this clone immediately and get you restored into a new
one in 48 hours.”

“Isn't there another way? Please? You have
to help me—I can't lose all this.” I couldn't admit my real reasons for being so
attached to this singularly miserable chapter in my life, not even
to myself.

The doctor rose to go. “Look, Julius, you haven't
got the Whuffie to make it worth anyone's time to
research a solution to this problem, other than the one that we all
know about. I can give you mood-suppressants, but that's
not a permanent solution.”

“Why not?”

He boggled. “You can't just take
dope for the rest of your life, son. Eventually, something will
happen to this body—I see from your file that you're
stroke-prone—and you're going to get
refreshed from your backup. The longer you wait, the more traumatic
it'll be. You're robbing from your future
self for your selfish present.”

It wasn't the first time the thought had crossed my
mind. Every passing day made it harder to take the cure. To lie down
and wake up friends with Dan, to wake up and be in love with Lil
again. To wake up to a Mansion the way I remembered it, a Hall of
Presidents where I could find Lil bent over with her head in a
President's guts of an afternoon. To lie down and wake
without disgrace, without knowing that my lover and my best friend
would betray me, had betrayed me.

I just couldn't do it—not yet, anyway.

Dan—Dan was going to kill himself soon, and if I
restored myself from my old backup, I'd lose my last
year with him. I'd lose his last year.

“Let's table that, doc. I hear what
you're saying, but there're complications. I
guess I'll take the mood-suppressants for now.”

He gave me a cold look. “I'll give you a
scrip, then. I could've done that without coming out
here. Please don't call me anymore.”

I was shocked by his obvious ire, but I didn't
understand it until he was gone and I told Dan what had happened.

“Us old-timers, we're used to thinking of
doctors as highly trained professionals—all that
pre-Bitchun med-school stuff, long internships, anatomy drills...
Truth is, the average doc today gets more training in bedside manner
than bioscience. ‘Doctor’ Pete is a
technician, not an MD, not the way you and I mean it. Anyone with
the kind of knowledge you're looking for is working as a
historical researcher, not a doctor.

“But that's not the illusion. The doc is
supposed to be the authority on medical matters, even though he's
only got one trick: restore from backup. You're
reminding Pete of that, and he's not happy to have it
happen.”

I waited a week before returning to the Magic Kingdom, sunning
myself on the white sand beach at the Contemporary, jogging the Walk
Around the World, taking a canoe out to the wild and overgrown
Discovery Island, and generally cooling out. Dan came by in the
evenings and it was like old times, running down the pros and cons
of Whuffie and Bitchunry and life in general, sitting on my porch
with a sweating pitcher of lemonade.

On the last night, he presented me with a clever little handheld,
a museum piece that I recalled fondly from the dawning days of the
Bitchun Society. It had much of the functionality of my defunct
systems, in a package I could slip in my shirt pocket. It felt like
part of a costume, like the turnip watches the Ben Franklin
streetmosphere players wore at the American Adventure.

Museum piece or no, it meant that I was once again qualified to
participate in the Bitchun Society, albeit more slowly and less
efficiently than I once may've. I took it downstairs the
next morning and drove to the Magic Kingdom's castmember
lot.

At least, that was the plan. When I got down to the
Contemporary's parking lot, my runabout was gone. A
quick check with the handheld revealed the worst: my Whuffie was low
enough that someone had just gotten inside and driven away,
realizing that they could make more popular use of it than I could.

With a sinking feeling, I trudged up to my room and swiped my key
through the lock. It emitted a soft, unsatisfied bzzz and
lit up, “Please see the front desk.” My room had been reassigned, too. I had the short end of the
Whuffie stick.

At least there was no mandatory Whuffie check on the monorail
platform, but the other people on the car were none too friendly to
me, and no one offered me an inch more personal space than was
necessary. I had hit bottom.

I took the castmember entrance to the Magic Kingdom, clipping my
name tag to my Disney Operations polo shirt, ignoring the glares of
my fellow castmembers in the utilidors.

I used the handheld to page Dan. “Hey there,” he said, brightly. I could tell instantly that I was being
humored.

“Where are you?” I
asked.

“Oh, up in the Square. By the Liberty Tree.”

In front of the Hall of Presidents. I worked the handheld, pinged
some Whuffie manually. Debra was spiked so high it seemed she'd
never come down, as were Tim and her whole crew in aggregate. They
were drawing from guests by the millions, and from castmembers and
from people who'd read the popular accounts of their
struggle against the forces of petty jealousy and sabotage—i.e.,
me.

I felt light-headed. I hurried along to costuming and changed
into the heavy green Mansion costume, then ran up the stairs to the
Square.

I found Dan sipping a coffee and sitting on a bench under the
giant, lantern-hung Liberty Tree. He had a second cup waiting for
me, and patted the bench next to him. I sat with him and sipped,
waiting for him to spill whatever bit of rotten news he had for me
this morning—I could feel it hovering like storm clouds.

He wouldn't talk though, not until we finished the
coffee. Then he stood and strolled over to the Mansion. It wasn't
rope-drop yet, and there weren't any guests in the Park,
which was all for the better, given what was coming next.

“Have you taken a look at Debra's Whuffie
lately?” he asked, finally, as we
stood by the pet cemetery, considering the empty scaffolding.

I started to pull out the handheld but he put a hand on my arm.
“Don't bother,” he
said, morosely. “Suffice it to say, Debra's
gang is number one with a bullet. Ever since word got out about what
happened to the Hall, they've been stacking it deep.
They can do just about anything, Jules, and get away with it.”

My stomach tightened and I found myself grinding my molars.
“So, what is it they've done, Dan?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

Dan didn't have to respond, because at that moment,
Tim emerged from the Mansion, wearing a light cotton work-smock. He
had a thoughtful expression, and when he saw us, he beamed his elfin
grin and came over.

“Hey guys!” he said.

“Hi, Tim,” Dan said.
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“Pretty exciting stuff, huh?” he said.

“I haven't told him yet,” Dan said, with forced lightness. “Why don't
you run it down?”

“Well, it's pretty radical, I have to
admit. We've learned some stuff from the Hall that we
wanted to apply, and at the same time, we wanted to capture some of
the historical character of the ghost story.”

I opened my mouth to object, but Dan put a hand on my forearm.
“Really?” he asked
innocently. “How do you plan on doing that?”

“Well, we're keeping the telepresence
robots—that's a honey of an idea,
Julius—but we're giving each one an uplink
so that it can flash-bake. We've got some high-Whuffie
horror writers pulling together a series of narratives about the
lives of each ghost: how they met their tragic ends, what they've
done since, you know.

“The way we've storyboarded it, the guests
stream through the ride pretty much the way they do now, walking
through the preshow and then getting into the ride-vehicles, the
Doom Buggies. But here's the big change: we slow it
all down. We trade off throughput for intensity, make it more
of a premium product.

“So you're a guest. From the queue to the
unload zone, you're being chased by these ghosts, these
telepresence robots, and they're really scary—I've
got Suneep's concept artists going back to the drawing
board, hitting basic research on stuff that'll just
scare the guests silly. When a ghost catches you, lays its hands on
you—wham! Flash-bake! You get its whole grisly story in
three seconds, across your frontal lobe. By the time you've
left, you've had ten or more ghost-contacts, and the
next time you come back, it's all new ghosts with all
new stories. The way that the Hall's drawing 'em,
we're bound to be a hit.” He
put his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels, clearly proud
of himself.

When Epcot Center first opened, long, long ago, there'd
been an ugly decade or so in ride design. Imagineering found a
winning formula for Spaceship Earth, the flagship ride in the big
golf ball, and, in their drive to establish thematic continuity,
they'd turned the formula into a cookie-cutter, stamping
out half a dozen clones for each of the “themed” areas in the Future Showcase. It went like this: first, we
were cavemen, then there was ancient Greece, then Rome burned (cue
sulfur-odor FX), then there was the Great Depression, and, finally,
we reached the modern age. Who knows what the future holds? We do!
We'll all have videophones and be living on the ocean
floor. Once was cute—compelling and inspirational,
even—but six times was embarrassing. Like everyone, once
Imagineering got themselves a good hammer, everything started to
resemble a nail. Even now, the Epcot ad-hocs were repeating the sins
of their forebears, closing every ride with a scene of Bitchun
utopia.

And Debra was repeating the classic mistake, tearing her way
through the Magic Kingdom with her blaster set to flash-bake.

“Tim,” I said,
hearing the tremble in my voice. “I thought you said that
you had no designs on the Mansion, that you and Debra wouldn't
be trying to take it away from us. Didn't you say
that?”

Tim rocked back as if I'd slapped him and the blood
drained from his face. “But we're not taking
it away!” he said. “You
invited us to help.”

I shook my head, confused. “We did?” I said.

“Sure,” he said.

“Yes,” Dan said.
“Kim and some of the other rehab cast went to Debra
yesterday and asked her to do a design review of the current rehab
and suggest any changes. She was good enough to agree, and they've
come up with some great ideas.” I
read between the lines: the newbies you invited in have gone over to
the other side and we're going to lose everything
because of them. I felt like shit.

“Well, I stand corrected,” I
said, carefully. Tim's grin came back and he clapped his
hands together. He really loves the Mansion, I thought. He
could have been on our side, if we had only played it all right.

Dan and I took to the utilidors and grabbed a pair of bicycles
and sped towards Suneep's lab, jangling our bells at the
rushing castmembers. “They don't have the
authority to invite Debra in,” I
panted as we pedaled.

“Says who?” Dan said.

“It was part of the deal—they knew that
they were probationary members right from the start. They weren't
even allowed into the design meetings.”

“Looks like they took themselves off probation,” he said.

Suneep gave us both a chilly look when we entered his lab. He had
dark circles under his eyes and his hands shook with exhaustion. He
seemed to be holding himself erect with nothing more than raw anger.

“So much for building without interference,” he said. “We agreed that this project wouldn't
change midway through. Now it has, and I've got other
commitments that I'm going to have to cancel because
this is going off-schedule.”

I made soothing apologetic gestures with my hands. “Suneep,
believe me, I'm just as upset about this as you are. We
don't like this one little bit.”

He harrumphed. “We had a deal, Julius,” he said, hotly. “I would do the rehab for you and
you would keep the ad-hocs off my back. I've been
holding up my end of the bargain, but where the hell have you been?
If they replan the rehab now, I'll have to go
along with them. I can't just leave the Mansion
half-done—they'll murder me.”

The kernel of a plan formed in my mind. “Suneep, we
don't like the new rehab plan, and we're
going to stop it. You can help. Just stonewall them—tell
them they'll have to find other Imagineering support if
they want to go through with it, that you're booked
solid.”

Dan gave me one of his long, considering looks, then nodded a
minute approval. “Yeah,” he
drawled. “That'll help all right. Just tell
'em that they're welcome to make any changes
they want to the plan, if they can find someone else to
execute them.”

Suneep looked unhappy. “Fine—so then they
go and find someone else to do it, and that person gets all the
credit for the work my team's done so far. I just flush
my time down the toilet.”

“It won't come to that,” I said quickly. “If you can just keep saying no
for a couple days, we'll do the rest.”

I sat in the back of the Adventureland conference room while Dan
exhorted.

“Look, you don't have to roll over for
Debra and her people! This is your garden, and you've
tended it responsibly for years. She's got no right to
move in on you—you've got all the Whuffie
you need to defend the place, if you all work together.”

No castmember likes confrontation, and the Liberty Square bunch
were tough to rouse to action. Dan had turned down the air
conditioning an hour before the meeting and closed up all the
windows, so that the room was a kiln for hard-firing irritation into
rage. I stood meekly in the back, as far as possible from Dan. He
was working his magic on my behalf, and I was content to let him do
his thing.

When Lil had arrived, she'd sized up the situation
with a sour expression: sit in the front, near Dan, or in the back,
near me. She'd chosen the middle, and to concentrate on
Dan I had to tear my eyes away from the sweat glistening on her
long, pale neck.

He lowered his tone. “I don't think
that's true.” He
grabbed a castmember by her hand and looked into her eyes. “Is
it true?” he said so low it was
almost a whisper.

“No,” the castmember
said.

He dropped her hand and whirled to face another castmember. “Is
it true?” he demanded, raising his
voice, slightly.

“No!” the castmember
said, his voice unnaturally loud after the whispers. A nervous
chuckle rippled through the crowd.

“Is it true?” he
said, striding to the podium, shouting now.

“No!” the crowd
roared.

“NO!” he shouted
back.

“You don't have to roll over and
take it! You can fight back, carry on with the plan, send them
packing. They're only taking over because you're
letting them. Are you going to let them?”

“NO!”

Bitchun wars are rare. Long before anyone tries a takeover of
anything, they've done the arithmetic and ensured
themselves that the ad-hoc they're displacing doesn't
have a hope of fighting back.

For the defenders, it's a simple decision: step down
gracefully and salvage some reputation out of the thing—fighting
back will surely burn away even that meager reward.

No one benefits from fighting back—least of all the
thing everyone's fighting over. For example:

It was the second year of my undergrad, taking a double-major in
not making trouble for my profs and keeping my mouth shut. It was
the early days of Bitchun, and most of us were still a little
unclear on the concept.

Not all of us, though: a group of campus shit-disturbers, grad
students in the Sociology Department, were on the bleeding edge of
the revolution, and they knew what they wanted: control of the
Department, oustering of the tyrannical, stodgy profs, a bully
pulpit from which to preach the Bitchun gospel to a generation of
impressionable undergrads who were too cowed by their workloads to
realize what a load of shit they were being fed by the University.

At least, that's what the intense, heavyset woman who
seized the mic at my Soc 200 course said, that sleepy morning
mid-semester at Convocation Hall. Nineteen hundred students filled
the hall, a capacity crowd of bleary, coffee-sipping time-markers,
and they woke up in a hurry when the woman's strident
harangue burst over their heads.

I saw it happen from the very start. The prof was down there on
the stage, a speck with a tie-mic, droning over his slides, and then
there was a blur as half a dozen grad students rushed the stage.
They were dressed in University poverty-chic, wrinkled slacks and
tattered sports coats, and five of them formed a human wall in front
of the prof while the sixth, the heavyset one with the dark hair and
the prominent mole on her cheek, unclipped his mic and clipped it to
her lapel.

“Wakey wakey!” she
called, and the reality of the moment hit home for me: this wasn't
on the lesson-plan.

“Come on, heads up! This is not a drill. The
University of Toronto Department of Sociology is under new
management. If you'll set your handhelds to
‘receive,’ we'll be beaming out
new lesson-plans momentarily. If you've forgotten your
handhelds, you can download the plans later on. I'm
going to run it down for you right now, anyway.

“Before I start though, I have a prepared statement
for you. You'll probably hear this a couple times more
today, in your other classes. It's worth repeating. Here
goes:

“We reject the stodgy, tyrannical rule of the profs at
this Department. We demand bully pulpits from which to preach the
Bitchun gospel. Effective immediately, the University of Toronto
Ad-Hoc Sociology Department is in charge. We promise
high-relevance curriculum with an emphasis on reputation economies,
post-scarcity social dynamics, and the social theory of infinite
life-extension. No more Durkheim, kids, just deadheading! This will
be fun.”

She taught the course like a pro—you could tell
she'd been drilling her lecture for a while.
Periodically, the human wall behind her shuddered as the prof made a
break for it and was restrained.

At precisely 9:50 a.m. she dismissed the class, which had hung on
her every word. Instead of trudging out and ambling to our next
class, the whole nineteen hundred of us rose, and, as one, started
buzzing to our neighbors, a roar of “Can you believe
it?” that followed us out the door
and to our next encounter with the Ad-Hoc Sociology Department.

It was cool, that day. I had another soc class, Constructing
Social Deviance, and we got the same drill there, the same stirring
propaganda, the same comical sight of a tenured prof battering
himself against a human wall of ad-hocs.

Reporters pounced on us when we left the class, jabbing at us
with mics and peppering us with questions. I gave them a big
thumbs-up and said, “Bitchun!” in classic undergrad eloquence.

The profs struck back the next morning. I got a heads-up from the
newscast as I brushed my teeth: the Dean of the Department of
Sociology told a reporter that the ad-hocs' courses
would not be credited, that they were a gang of thugs who were
totally unqualified to teach. A counterpoint interview from a
spokesperson for the ad-hocs established that all of the new
lecturers had been writing course-plans and lecture notes for the
profs they replaced for years, and that they'd also
written most of their journal articles.

The profs brought University security out to help them regain
their lecterns, only to be repelled by ad-hoc security guards in
homemade uniforms. University security got the message—anyone
could be replaced—and stayed away.

The profs picketed. They held classes out front attended by
grade-conscious brown-nosers who worried that the ad-hocs'
classes wouldn't count towards their degrees. Fools like
me alternated between the outdoor and indoor classes, not learning
much of anything.

No one did. The profs spent their course-times whoring for
Whuffie, leading the seminars like encounter groups instead of
lectures. The ad-hocs spent their time badmouthing the profs and
tearing apart their coursework.

At the end of the semester, everyone got a credit and the
University Senate disbanded the Sociology program in favor of a
distance-ed offering from Concordia in Montreal. Forty years later,
the fight was settled forever. Once you took backup-and-restore, the
rest of the Bitchunry just followed, a value-system settling over
you.

Those who didn't take backup-and-restore may have
objected, but, hey, they all died.

The Liberty Square ad-hocs marched shoulder to shoulder through
the utilidors and, as a mass, took back the Haunted Mansion. Dan,
Lil and I were up front, careful not to brush against one another as
we walked quickly through the backstage door and started a
bucket-brigade, passing out the materials that Debra's
people had stashed there, along a line that snaked back to the front
porch of the Hall of Presidents, where they were unceremoniously
dumped.

Once the main stash was vacated, we split up and roamed the ride,
its service corridors and dioramas, the break-room and the secret
passages, rounding up every scrap of Debra's crap and
passing it out the door.

In the attic scene, I ran into Kim and three of her giggly little
friends, their eyes glinting in the dim light. The gaggle of
transhuman kids made my guts clench, made me think of Zed and of Lil
and of my unmediated brain, and I had a sudden urge to shred them
verbally.

No.

No. That way lay madness and war. This was about taking back what
was ours, not punishing the interlopers. “Kim, I think
you should leave,” I said, quietly.

She snorted and gave me a dire look. “Who died and
made you boss?” she said. Her
friends thought it very brave, they made it clear with
double-jointed hip-thrusts and glares.

“Kim, you can leave now or you can leave later. The
longer you wait, the worse it will be for you and your Whuffie. You
blew it, and you're not a part of the Mansion anymore.
Go home, go to Debra. Don't stay here, and don't
come back. Ever.”

Ever. Be cast out of this thing that you love, that you obsess
over, that you worked for. “Now,” I said, quiet, dangerous, barely in control.

They sauntered into the graveyard, hissing vitriol at me. Oh,
they had lots of new material to post to the anti-me sites, messages
that would get them Whuffie with people who thought I was the scum
of the earth. A popular view, those days.

I got out of the Mansion and looked at the bucket-brigade,
followed it to the front of the Hall. The Park had been open for an
hour, and a herd of guests watched the proceedings in confusion. The
Liberty Square ad-hocs passed their loads around in clear
embarrassment, knowing that they were violating every principle they
cared about.

As I watched, gaps appeared in the bucket-brigade as castmembers
slipped away, faces burning scarlet with shame. At the Hall of
Presidents, Debra presided over an orderly relocation of her things,
a cheerful cadre of her castmembers quickly moving it all offstage.
I didn't have to look at my handheld to know what was
happening to our Whuffie.

By evening, we were back on schedule. Suneep supervised the
placement of his telepresence rigs and Lil went over every system in
minute detail, bossing a crew of ad-hocs that trailed behind her,
double- and triple-checking it all.

Suneep smiled at me when he caught sight of me, hand-scattering
dust in the parlor.

“Thanks, Suneep. I'm not sure how
masterful it was, but we got the job done, and that's
what counts.”

“Your partners, they're happier than
I've seen them since this whole business started. I know
how they feel!”

My partners? Oh, yes, Dan and Lil. How happy were they, I
wondered. Happy enough to get back together? My mood fell, even
though a part of me said that Dan would never go back to her, not
after all we'd been through together.

“I'm glad you're glad. We
couldn't have done it without you, and it looks like
we'll be open for business in a week.”

“Oh, I should think so. Are you coming to the party
tonight?”

Party? Probably something the Liberty Square ad-hocs were putting
on. I would almost certainly be persona non grata. “I
don't think so,” I
said, carefully. “I'll probably work late
here.”

He chided me for working too hard, but once he saw that I had no
intention of being dragged to the party, he left off.

And that's how I came to be in the Mansion at 2 a.m.
the next morning, dozing in a backstage break room when I heard a
commotion from the parlor. Festive voices, happy and loud, and I
assumed it was Liberty Square ad-hocs coming back from their party.

I roused myself and entered the parlor.

Kim and her friends were there, pushing hand-trucks of Debra's
gear. I got ready to shout something horrible at them, and that's
when Debra came in. I moderated the shout to a snap, opened my mouth
to speak, stopped.

Behind Debra were Lil's parents, frozen these long
years in their canopic jars in Kissimmee.

CHAPTER 9

Lil's parents went into their jars with little
ceremony. I saw them just before they went in, when they stopped in
at Lil's and my place to kiss her goodbye and wish her
well.

Tom and I stood awkwardly to the side while Lil and her mother
held an achingly chipper and polite farewell.

“So,” I said to Tom.
“Deadheading.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Yup. Took the backup this
morning.”

Before coming to see their daughter, they'd taken
their backups. When they woke, this event—everything
following the backup—would never have happened for them.

'We'll be sampling monthly, just getting
a digest dumped to us. When things look interesting enough, we'll
come on back.” He waggled a finger
at me. “I'll be keeping an eye on you and
Lillian—you treat her right, you hear?”

“We're sure going to miss you two around
here,” I said.

He pishtoshed and said, “You won't even
notice we're gone. This is your world now—we're
just getting out of the way for a while, letting you-all take a run
at it. We wouldn't be going down if we didn't
have faith in you two.”

Lil and her mom kissed one last time. Her mother was more
affectionate than I'd ever seen her, even to the point
of tearing up a little. Here in this moment of vanishing
consciousness, she could be whomever she wanted, knowing that it
wouldn't matter the next time she awoke.

“Julius,” she said,
taking my hands, squeezing them. “You've got
some wonderful times ahead of you—between Lil and the
Park, you're going to have a tremendous experience, I
just know it.” She was infinitely
serene and compassionate, and I knew it didn't count.

Still smiling, they got into their runabout and drove away to get
the lethal injections, to become disembodied consciousnesses, to
lose their last moments with their darling daughter.

They were not happy to be returned from the dead. Their new
bodies were impossibly young, pubescent and hormonal and doleful and
kitted out in the latest trendy styles. In the company of Kim and
her pals, they made a solid mass of irate adolescence.

“Just what the hell do you think you're
doing?” Rita asked, shoving me hard
in the chest. I stumbled back into my carefully scattered dust,
raising a cloud.

“No,” I said. “No
goddamn it no. You're going to hear me out, and then
I'm going to get Lil and her people and they're
going to back me up. That's not negotiable.”

We stared at each other across the dim parlor. Debra made a
twiddling motion and the lights came up full and harsh. The expertly
crafted gloom went away and it was just a dusty room with a fake
fireplace.

“Let him speak,” Debra
said. Rita folded her arms and glared.

“I did some really awful things,” I said, keeping my head up, keeping my eyes on them. “I
can't excuse them, and I don't ask you to
forgive them. But that doesn't change the fact that
we've put our hearts and souls into this place, and
it's not right to take it from us. Can't we
have one constant corner of the world, one bit frozen in time for
the people who love it that way? Why does your success mean our
failure?

“Can't you see that we're
carrying on your work? That we're tending a legacy you
left us?”

“Are you through?” Rita
asked.

I nodded.

“This place is not a historical preserve, Julius,
it's a ride. If you don't understand that,
you're in the wrong place. It's not my
goddamn fault that you decided that your stupidity was on my behalf,
and it doesn't make it any less stupid. All you've
done is confirm my worst fears.”

Debra's mask of impartiality slipped. “You
stupid, deluded asshole,” she said,
softly. “You totter around, pissing and moaning about
your little murder, your little health problems—yes,
I've heard—your little fixation on keeping
things the way they are. You need some perspective, Julius. You need
to get away from here: Disney World isn't good for you
and you're sure as hell not any good for Disney
World.”

It would have hurt less if I hadn't come to the same
conclusion myself, somewhere along the way.

I found the ad-hoc at a Fort Wilderness campsite, sitting around
a fire and singing, necking, laughing. The victory party. I trudged
into the circle and hunted for Lil.

She was sitting on a log, staring into the fire, a million miles
away. Lord, she was beautiful when she fretted. I stood in front of
her for a minute and she stared right through me until I tapped her
shoulder. She gave an involuntary squeak and then smiled at herself.

“Lil,” I said, then
stopped. Your parents are home, and they've joined
the other side.

For the first time in an age, she looked at me softly, smiled
even. She patted the log next to her. I sat down, felt the heat of
the fire on my face, her body heat on my side. God, how did I screw
this up?

Without warning, she put her arms around me and hugged me hard. I
hugged her back, nose in her hair, woodsmoke smell and shampoo and
sweat. “We did it,” she
whispered fiercely. I held onto her. No, we didn't.

“Lil,” I said again,
and pulled away.

“What?” she said, her
eyes shining. She was stoned, I saw that now.

“Your parents are back. They came to the Mansion.”

She was confused, shrinking, and I pressed on.

“They were with Debra.”

She reeled back as if I'd slapped her.

“I told them I'd bring the whole group
back to talk it over.”

She hung her head and her shoulders shook, and I tentatively put
an arm around her. She shook it off and sat up. She was crying and
laughing at the same time. “I'll have a ferry
sent over,” she said.

I sat in the back of the ferry with Dan, away from the confused
and angry ad-hocs. I answered his questions with terse, one-word
answers, and he gave up. We rode in silence, the trees on the edges
of the Seven Seas Lagoon whipping back and forth in an approaching
storm.

The ad-hoc shortcutted through the west parking lot and moved
through the quiet streets of Frontierland apprehensively, a funeral
procession that stopped the nighttime custodial staff in their
tracks.

As we drew up on Liberty Square, I saw that the work-lights were
blazing and a tremendous work-gang of Debra's ad-hocs
were moving from the Hall to the Mansion, undoing our teardown of
their work.

Working alongside of them were Tom and Rita, Lil's
parents, sleeves rolled up, forearms bulging with new, toned muscle.
The group stopped in its tracks and Lil went to them, stumbling on
the wooden sidewalk.

I expected hugs. There were none. In their stead, parents and
daughter stalked each other, shifting weight and posture to track
each other, maintain a constant, sizing distance.

“What the hell are you doing?” Lil said, finally. She didn't address her mother,
which surprised me. It didn't surprise Tom, though.

He dipped forward, the shuffle of his feet loud in the quiet
night. “We're working,” he said.

“No, you're not,” Lil said. “You're destroying. Stop
it.”

Lil's mother darted to her husband's
side, not saying anything, just standing there.

Wordlessly, Tom hefted the box he was holding and headed to the
Mansion. Lil caught his arm and jerked it so he dropped his load.

“You're not listening. The Mansion is
ours. Stop. It.”

Lil's mother gently took Lil's hand off
Tom's arm, held it in her own. “I'm
glad you're passionate about it, Lillian,” she said. “I'm proud of your
commitment.”

Even at a distance of ten yards, I heard Lil's choked
sob, saw her collapse in on herself. Her mother took her in her
arms, rocked her. I felt like a voyeur, but couldn't
bring myself to turn away.

“Shhh,” her mother
said, a sibilant sound that matched the rustling of the leaves on
the Liberty Tree. “Shhh. We don't have to be
on the same side, you know.”

They held the embrace and held it still. Lil straightened, then
bent again and picked up her father's box, carried it to
the Mansion. One at a time, the rest of her ad-hoc moved forward and
joined them.

This is how you hit bottom. You wake up in your friend's
hotel room and you power up your handheld and it won't
log on. You press the call-button for the elevator and it gives you
an angry buzz in return. You take the stairs to the lobby and no one
looks at you as they jostle past you.

You become a non-person.

Scared. I trembled when I ascended the stairs to Dan's
room, when I knocked at his door, louder and harder than I meant, a
panicked banging.

Dan answered the door and I saw his eyes go to his HUD, back to
me. “Jesus,” he said.

I sat on the edge of my bed, head in my hands.

“What?” I said, what
happened, what happened to me?

“You're out of the ad-hoc,” he said. “You're out of Whuffie.
You're bottomed-out,” he
said.

This is how you hit bottom in Walt Disney World, in a hotel with
the hissing of the monorail and the sun streaming through the
window, the hooting of the steam engines on the railroad and the
distant howl of the recorded wolves at the Haunted Mansion. The
world drops away from you, recedes until you're nothing
but a speck, a mote in blackness.

I was hyperventilating, light-headed. Deliberately, I slowed my
breath, put my head between my knees until the dizziness passed.

“Take me to Lil,” I
said.

Driving together, hammering cigarette after cigarette into my
face, I remembered the night Dan had come to Disney World, when
I'd driven him to my—Lil's—house,
and how happy I'd been then, how secure.

I looked at Dan and he patted my hand. “Strange
times,” he said.

It was enough. We found Lil in an underground break-room, lightly
dozing on a ratty sofa. Her head rested on Tom's lap,
her feet on Rita's. All three snored softly. They'd
had a long night.

Dan shook Lil awake. She stretched out and opened her eyes,
looked sleepily at me. The blood drained from her face.

“Hello, Julius,” she
said, coldly.

Now Tom and Rita were awake, too. Lil sat up.

“Were you going to tell me?” I asked, quietly. “Or were you just going to kick
me out and let me find out on my own?”

“You were my next stop,” Lil
said.

“Then I've saved you some time.” I pulled up a chair. “Tell me all about it.”

“There's nothing to tell,” Rita snapped. “You're out. You had to
know it was coming—for God's sake, you were
tearing Liberty Square apart!”

“How would you know?” I
asked. I struggled to remain calm. “You've
been asleep for ten years!”

“We got updates,” Rita
said. “That's why we're back—we
couldn't let it go on the way it was. We owed it to
Debra.”

“And Lillian,” Tom
said.

“And Lillian,” Rita
said, absently.

Dan pulled up a chair of his own. “You're
not being fair to him,” he said. At
least someone was on my side.

“We've been more than fair,” Lil said. “You know that better than anyone, Dan.
We've forgiven and forgiven and forgiven, made every
allowance. He's sick and he won't take the
cure. There's nothing more we can do for him.”

“You could be his friend,” Dan said. The light-headedness was back, and I slumped in my
chair, tried to control my breathing, the panicked thumping of my
heart.

“You could try to understand, you could try to help
him. You could stick with him, the way he stuck with you. You
don't have to toss him out on his ass.”

Lil had the good grace to look slightly shamed. “I'll
get him a room,” she said. “For
a month. In Kissimmee. A motel. I'll pick up his network
access. Is that fair?”

“It's more than fair,” Rita said. Why did she hate me so much? I'd been
there for her daughter while she was away—ah. That might
do it, all right. “I don't think it's
warranted. If you want to take care of him, sir, you can. It's
none of my family's business.”

Lil's eyes blazed. “Let me handle this,” she said. “All right?”

Rita stood up abruptly. “You do whatever you want,” she said, and stormed out of the room.

“I'm going to be taking a lethal injection
at the end of the week,” Dan said.
“Three days. That's personal, but you
asked.”

Tom shook his head. Some friends you've got
yourself, I could see him thinking it.

“That soon?” Lil
asked, a throb in her voice.

Dan nodded.

In a dreamlike buzz, I stood and wandered out into the utilidor,
out through the western castmember parking, and away.

I wandered along the cobbled, disused Walk Around the World, each
flagstone engraved with the name of a family that had visited the
Park a century before. The names whipped past me like epitaphs.

The sun came up noon high as I rounded the bend of deserted beach
between the Grand Floridian and the Polynesian. Lil and I had come
here often, to watch the sunset from a hammock, arms around each
other, the Park spread out before us like a lighted toy village.

Now the beach was deserted, the Wedding Pavilion silent. I felt
suddenly cold though I was sweating freely. So cold.

Dreamlike, I walked into the lake, water filling my shoes,
logging my pants, warm as blood, warm on my chest, on my chin, on my
mouth, on my eyes.

I opened my mouth and inhaled deeply, water filling my lungs,
choking and warm. At first I sputtered, but I was in control now,
and I inhaled again. The water shimmered over my eyes, and then was
dark.

I woke on Doctor Pete's cot in the Magic Kingdom,
restraints around my wrists and ankles, a tube in my nose. I closed
my eyes, for a moment believing that I'd been restored
from a backup, problems solved, memories behind me.

Sorrow knifed through me as I realized that Dan was probably dead
by now, my memories of him gone forever.

Gradually, I realized that I was thinking nonsensically. The fact
that I remembered Dan meant that I hadn't been refreshed
from my backup, that my broken brain was still there, churning along
in unmediated isolation.

“You sure are,” he
said. “Lucky for you they found you—another
minute or two and I'd be burying you right now.”

No, I thought, confused. They'd have
restored me from backup. Then it hit me: I'd gone
on record refusing restore from backup after having it recommended
by a medical professional. No one would have restored me after that.
I would have been truly and finally dead. I started to shiver.

“Easy,” Dan said.
“Easy. It's all right now. Doctor says
you've got a cracked rib or two from the CPR, but
there's no brain damage.”

He shooed Dan away and took his seat. Once Dan had left the room,
he shone lights in my eyes and peeked in my ears, then sat back and
considered me. “Well, Julius,” he said. “What exactly is the problem? We can get
you a lethal injection if that's what you want, but
offing yourself in the Seven Seas Lagoon just isn't good
show. In the meantime, would you like to talk about it?”

Part of me wanted to spit in his eye. I'd tried to
talk about it and he'd told me to go to hell, and now he
changes his mind? But I did want to talk.

“I didn't want to die,” I said.

“Oh no?” he said.
“I think the evidence suggests the contrary.”

“I wasn't trying to die,” I protested. “I was trying to—” What? I was trying to… abdicate.
Take the refresh without choosing it, without shutting out the last
year of my best friend's life. Rescue myself from the
stinking pit I'd sunk into without flushing Dan away
along with it. That's all, that's all.

“I wasn't thinking—I was just
acting. It was an episode or something. Does that mean I'm
nuts?”

“Oh, probably,” Doctor
Pete said, offhandedly. “But let's worry
about one thing at a time. You can die if you want to, that's
your right. I'd rather you lived, if you want my
opinion, and I doubt that I'm the only one, Whuffie be
damned. If you're going to live, I'd like to
record you saying so, just in case. We have a backup of you on
file—I'd hate to have to delete it.”

“Yes,” I said.
“Yes, I'd like to be restored if there's
no other option.” It was true. I
didn't want to die.

“All right then,” Doctor
Pete said. “It's on file and I'm
a happy man. Now, are you nuts? Probably. A little. Nothing a little
counseling and some R&R wouldn't fix, if you want my
opinion. I could find you somewhere if you want.”

“Not yet,” I said.
“I appreciate the offer, but there's
something else I have to do first.”

Dan took me back to the room and put me to bed with a transdermal
soporific that knocked me out for the rest of the day. When I woke,
the moon was over the Seven Seas Lagoon and the monorail was silent.

I stood on the patio for a while, thinking about all the things
this place had meant to me for more than a century: happiness,
security, efficiency, fantasy. All of it gone. It was time I left.
Maybe back to space, find Zed and see if I could make her happy
again. Anywhere but here. Once Dan was dead—God, it was
sinking in finally—I could catch a ride down to the Cape
for a launch.

“What's on your mind?” Dan asked from behind me, startling me. He was in his boxers,
thin and rangy and hairy.

“It may be none of my business,” he said, “but why the fuck not? Jesus, Julius,
what're you afraid of?”

“You don't want to know,” I said.

“I'll be the judge of that.”

“Let's have a drink, first,” I said.

Dan rolled his eyes back for a second, then said, “All
right, two Coronas, coming up.”

After the room-service bot had left, we cracked the beers and
pulled chairs out onto the porch.

“You sure you want to know this?” I asked.

He tipped his bottle at me. “Sure as shootin',” he said.

“I don't want refresh because it would
mean losing the last year,” I said.

He nodded. “By which you mean ‘my last
year,’” he said.
“Right?”

I nodded and drank.

“I thought it might be like that. Julius, you are many
things, but hard to figure out you are not. I have something to say
that might help you make the decision. If you want to hear it, that
is.”

What could he have to say? “Sure,” I said. “Sure.” In
my mind, I was on a shuttle headed for orbit, away from all of this.

“I had you killed,” he
said. “Debra asked me to, and I set it up. You were right
all along.”

The shuttle exploded in silent, slow moving space, and I spun
away from it. I opened and shut my mouth.

It was Dan's turn to look away. “Debra
proposed it. We were talking about the people I'd met
when I was doing my missionary work, the stone crazies who I'd
have to chase away after they'd rejoined the Bitchun
Society. One of them, a girl from Cheyenne Mountain, she followed me
down here, kept leaving me messages. I told Debra, and that's
when she got the idea.

“I'd get the girl to shoot you and
disappear. Debra would give me Whuffie—piles of it, and
her team would follow suit. I'd be months closer to my
goal. That was all I could think about back then, you remember.”

“We planned it, then Debra had herself refreshed from
a backup—no memory of the event, just the Whuffie for
me.”

“Yes,” I said. That
would work. Plan a murder, kill yourself, have yourself refreshed
from a backup made before the plan. How many times had Debra done
terrible things and erased their memories that way?

“Yes,” he agreed.
“We did it, I'm ashamed to say. I can prove
it, too—I have my backup, and I can get Jeanine to tell
it, too.” He drained his beer.
“That's my plan. Tomorrow. I'll
tell Lil and her folks, Kim and her people, the whole ad-hoc. A
going-away present from a shitty friend.”

My throat was dry and tight. I drank more beer. “You
knew all along,” I said. “You
could have proved it at any time.”

All this time. Lil and he, standing on my porch, telling
me I needed help. Doctor Pete, telling me I needed refresh from
backup, me saying no, no, no, not wanting to lose my last year with
Dan.

“I've done some pretty shitty things in my
day,” he said. “This is
the absolute worst. You helped me and I betrayed you. I'm
sure glad I don't believe in God—that'd
make what I'm going to do even scarier.”

Dan was going to kill himself in two days' time. My
friend and my murderer. “Dan,” I croaked. I couldn't make any sense of my mind.
Dan, taking care of me, helping me, sticking up for me, carrying
this horrible shame with him all along. Ready to die, wanting to go
with a clean conscience.

“You're forgiven,” I said. And it was true.

He stood.

“Where are you going” I
asked.

“To find Jeanine, the one who pulled the trigger.
I'll meet you at the Hall of Presidents at nine a.m..”

I went in through the Main Gate, not a castmember any longer, a
Guest with barely enough Whuffie to scrape in, use the water
fountains and stand in line. If I were lucky, a castmember might
spare me a chocolate banana. Probably not, though.

I stood in the line for the Hall of Presidents. Other guests
checked my Whuffie, then averted their eyes. Even the children. A
year before, they'd have been striking up conversations,
asking me about my job here at the Magic Kingdom.

I sat in my seat at the Hall of Presidents, watching the short
film with the rest, sitting patiently while they rocked in their
seats under the blast of the flash-bake. A castmember picked up the
stageside mic and thanked everyone for coming; the doors swung open
and the Hall was empty, except for me. The castmember narrowed her
eyes at me, then recognizing me, turned her back and went to show in
the next group.

No group came. Instead, Dan and the girl I'd seen on
the replay entered.

“We've closed it down for the morning,” he said.

I was staring at the girl, seeing her smirk as she pulled the
trigger on me, seeing her now with a contrite, scared expression.
She was terrified of me.

“You must be Jeanine,” I
said. I stood and shook her hand. “I'm
Julius.”

Her hand was cold, and she took it back and wiped it on her
pants.

My castmember instincts took over. “Please, have a
seat. Don't worry, it'll all be fine.
Really. No hard feelings.” I
stopped short of offering to get her a glass of water.

Put her at her ease, said a snotty voice in my head.
She'll make a better witness. Or make her nervous,
pathetic—that'll work, too; make Debra look
even worse.

I told the voice to shut up and got her a cup of water.

By the time I came back, the whole gang was there. Debra, Lil,
her folks, Tim. Debra's gang and Lil's gang,
now one united team. Soon to be scattered.

Dan took the stage, used the stageside mic to broadcast his
voice. “Eleven months ago, I did an awful thing. I
plotted with Debra to have Julius murdered. I used a friend who was
a little confused at the time, used her to pull the trigger. It was
Debra's idea that having Julius killed would cause
enough confusion that she could take over the Hall of Presidents. It
was.”

There was a roar of conversation. I looked at Debra, saw that she
was sitting calmly, as though Dan had just accused her of sneaking
an extra helping of dessert. Lil's parents, to either
side of her, were less sanguine. Tom's jaw was set and
angry, Rita was speaking angrily to Debra. Hickory Jackson in the
old Hall used to say, I will hang the first man I can lay hands
on from the first tree I can find.

“Debra had herself refreshed from backup after we
planned it,” Dan went on, as though
no one was talking. “I was supposed to do the same, but I
didn't. I have a backup in my public directory—anyone
can examine it. Right now, I'd like to bring Jeanine up,
she's got a few words she'd like to say.”

I helped Jeanine take the stage. She was still trembling, and the
ad-hocs were an insensate babble of recriminations. Despite myself,
I was enjoying it.

“Hello,” Jeanine said
softly. She had a lovely voice, a lovely face. I wondered if we
could be friends when it was all over. She probably didn't
care much about Whuffie, one way or another.

The discussion went on. Dan took the mic from her and said,
“Please! Can we have a little respect for our visitor?
Please? People?”

Gradually, the din decreased. Dan passed the mic back to Jeanine.
“Hello,” she said again,
and flinched from the sound of her voice in the Hall's
PA. “My name is Jeanine. I'm the one who
killed Julius, a year ago. Dan asked me to, and I did it. I didn't
ask why. I trusted—trust—him. He told me
that Julius would make a backup a few minutes before I shot him, and
that he could get me out of the Park without getting caught. I'm
very sorry.” There was something
off-kilter about her, some stilt to her stance and words that let
you know she wasn't all there. Growing up in a mountain
might do that to you. I snuck a look at Lil, whose lips were pressed
together. Growing up in a theme park might do that to you, too.

“Thank you, Jeanine,” Dan
said, taking back the mic. “You can have a seat now.
I've said everything I need to say—Julius
and I have had our own discussions in private. If there's
anyone else who'd like to speak—”

The words were barely out of his mouth before the crowd erupted
again in words and waving hands. Beside me, Jeanine flinched. I took
her hand and shouted in her ear: “Have you ever been on
the Pirates of the Carribean?”

She shook her head.

I stood up and pulled her to her feet. “You'll
love it,” I said, and led her out
of the Hall.

CHAPTER 10

I booked us ringside seats at the Polynesian Luau, riding high on
a fresh round of sympathy Whuffie, and Dan and I drank a dozen
lapu-lapus in hollowed-out pineapples before giving up on the idea
of getting drunk.

Jeanine watched the fire-dances and the torch-lighting with eyes
like saucers, and picked daintily at her spare ribs with one hand,
never averting her attention from the floor show. When they danced
the fast hula, her eyes jiggled. I chuckled.

From where we sat, I could see the spot where I'd
waded into the Seven Seas Lagoon and breathed in the blood-temp
water, I could see Cinderella's Castle, across the
lagoon, I could see the monorails and the ferries and the busses
making their busy way through the Park, shuttling teeming masses of
guests from place to place. Dan toasted me with his pineapple and I
toasted him back, drank it dry and belched in satisfaction.

Full belly, good friends, and the sunset behind a troupe of
tawny, half-naked hula dancers. Who needs the Bitchun Society,
anyway?

When it was over, we watched the fireworks from the beach, my
toes dug into the clean white sand. Dan slipped his hand into my
left hand, and Jeanine took my right. When the sky darkened and the
lighted barges puttered away through the night, we three sat in the
hammock.

I looked out over the Seven Seas Lagoon and realized that this
was my last night, ever, in Walt Disney World. It was time to reboot
again, start afresh. That's what the Park was for, only
somehow, this visit, I'd gotten stuck. Dan had unstuck
me.

The talk turned to Dan's impending death.

“So, tell me what you think of this,” he said, hauling away on a glowing cigarette.

“Shoot,” I said.

“I'm thinking—why take lethal
injection? I mean, I may be done here for now, but why should I make
an irreversible decision?”

“Why did you want to before?” I asked.

“Oh, it was the macho thing, I guess. The finality and
all. But hell, I don't have to prove anything, right?”

“Sure,” I said,
magnanimously.

“So,” he said,
thoughtfully. “The question I'm asking is,
how long can I deadhead for? There are folks who go down for a
thousand years, ten thousand, right?”

“So, you're thinking, what, a million?” I joked.

He laughed. “A million? You're
thinking too small, son. Try this on for size: the heat death of the
universe.”

“The heat death of the universe,” I repeated.

“Sure,” he drawled,
and I sensed his grin in the dark. “Ten to the hundred
years or so. The Stelliferous Period—it's
when all the black holes have run dry and things get, you know,
stupendously dull. Cold, too. So I'm thinking—why
not leave a wake-up call for some time around then?”

“Sounds unpleasant to me,” I
said. “Brrrr.”

“Not at all! I figure, self-repairing nano-based
canopic jar, mass enough to feed it—say, a trillion-ton
asteroid—and a lot of solitude when the time comes
around. I'll poke my head in every century or so, just
to see what's what, but if nothing really stupendous
crops up, I'll take the long ride out. The final
frontier.”

“That's pretty cool,” Jeanine said.

“Thanks,” Dan said.

“You're not kidding, are you?” I asked.

“Nope, I sure ain't,” he said.

They didn't invite me back into the ad-hoc, even
after Debra left in Whuffie-penury and they started to put the
Mansion back the way it was. Tim called me to say that with enough
support from Imagineering, they thought they could get it up and
running in a week. Suneep was ready to kill someone, I swear. A
house divided against itself cannot stand, as Mr.
Lincoln used to say at the Hall of Presidents.

I packed three changes of clothes and a toothbrush in my
shoulderbag and checked out of my suite at the Polynesian at ten
a.m., then met Jeanine and Dan at the valet parking out front. Dan
had a runabout he'd picked up with my Whuffie, and I
piled in with Jeanine in the middle. We played old Beatles tunes on
the stereo all the long way to Cape Canaveral. Our shuttle lifted at
noon.

The shuttle docked four hours later, but by the time we'd
been through decontam and orientation, it was suppertime. Dan,
nearly as Whuffie-poor as Debra after his confession, nevertheless
treated us to a meal in the big bubble, squeeze-tubes of heady booze
and steaky paste, and we watched the universe get colder for a
while.

There were a couple guys jamming, tethered to a guitar and a set
of tubs, and they weren't half bad.

Jeanine was uncomfortable hanging there naked. She'd
gone to space with her folks after Dan had left the mountain, but it
was in a long-haul generation ship. She'd abandoned it
after a year or two and deadheaded back to Earth in a support-pod.
She'd get used to life in space after a while. Or she
wouldn't.

“Well,” Dan said.

“Yup,” I said, aping
his laconic drawl. He smiled.

“It's that time,” he said.

Spheres of saline tears formed in Jeanine's eyes, and
I brushed them away, setting them adrift in the bubble. I'd
developed some real tender, brother-sister type feelings for her
since I'd watched her saucer-eye her way through the
Magic Kingdom. No romance—not for me, thanks! But
camaraderie and a sense of responsibility.

“See you in ten to the hundred,” Dan said, and headed to the airlock. I started after him, but
Jeanine caught my hand.

“He hates long good-byes,” she said.

“I know,” I said, and
watched him go.

The universe gets older. So do I. So does my backup, sitting in
redundant distributed storage dirtside, ready for the day that space
or age or stupidity kills me. It recedes with the years, and I write
out my life longhand, a letter to the me that I'll be
when it's restored into a clone somewhere, somewhen.
It's important that whoever I am then knows about this
year, and it's going to take a lot of tries for me to
get it right.

In the meantime, I'm working on another symphony, one
with a little bit of “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” and a nod to “It's a Small World After
All,” and especially “There's
a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.”

Jeanine says it's pretty good, but what does she
know? She's barely fifty.

We've both got a lot of living to do before we know
what's what.

Acknowledgements:

I could never have written this book without the personal support
of my friends and family, especially Roz Doctorow, Gord Doctorow and
Neil Doctorow, Amanda Foubister, Steve Samenski, Pat York, Grad
Conn, John Henson, John Rose, the writers at the Cecil Street
Irregulars and Mark Frauenfelder.

I am also indebted to my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and my
agent Donald Maass, who believed in this book and helped me bring it
to fruition.

Finally, I must thank the readers, the geeks and the Imagineers
who inspired this book.

Cory Doctorow

San Francisco

September 2002

About the author:

Cory Doctorow is Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, www.eff.org, and maintains a personal site at
www.craphound.com. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing
Boing at www.boingboing.net, with more than 250,000 visitors a
month. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the
2000 Hugo Awards. Born and raised in Toronto, he now lives in San
Francisco. He enjoys using Google to look up interesting facts about
long walks on the beach.

Other books by Cory Doctorow:

A Place So Foreign and Eight
More– short story collection, forthcoming
from Four Walls Eight Windows in fall 2003, with an introduction by
Bruce Sterling